MK

“It is only recently that we have realised the all-important part played by legendary lore in forming and stamping a nation’s character. A people’s character and a people’s heritage of tradition act and react upon each other, down the ages, the outstanding qualities of both getting ever more and more alike — so long as their racial traditions are cherished as an intimate part of their life. But the people’s character gets a new direction on the day that there comes into their life any influence which lessens their loving regard for the past.”
― Seumas MacManus, The Story of the Irish Race: A Popular History of Ireland

“Writing to Ballou on the day he had shipped the final manuscript, Steinbeck said: “It will probably be a hard book to sell. Its characters are not ‘home folks.’ They make no more attempt at being sincerely human than the people in the Iliad. Boileau [Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux, in The Art of the Poetic (1674)] ... insisted that only gods, kings and heroes were worth writing about. I firmly believe that. The detailed accounts of the lives of clerks don’t interest me much, unless, of course, the clerk breaks into heroism.”
― John Steinbeck, To a God Unknown

“Within a year Ballou, whom Steinbeck would eventually consider a “fine” and “sensitive” man, but too gentlemanly to fight New York publishing battles, remaindered both The Pastures of Heaven and To a God Unknown and rejected Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat manuscript as unsuitable. For a while Steinbeck was back in a familiar situation: writing under stressful circumstances (both his parents were seriously ill) and trying not to worry about publication. Arguably, the time he and Carol spent caring first for his mother, then for his father, probably did as much as anything else to end Steinbeck’s interest in heroic, larger-than-life literary characters. Frequent interruptions to clean his mother’s bed-pans and wash loads of soiled sheets, and later to witness his father’s decline into senility, refocused Steinbeck’s attention on common life, on the realm of “clerks” who, when they broke through reality at all, broke into a far more limited, even dubious, kind of heroism than Henry Morgan’s or Joseph Wayne’s. Steinbeck had already struck that chord in Pastures, but it would be with In Dubious Battle and with Of Mice and Men that a gritty style and an uncompromising vision of beleaguered humans caught in overwhelming circumstances would carry his “new conception of realities” to yet another stage of achievement.”
― John Steinbeck, To a God Unknown

“In a famed battle at Southern Moytura (on the Mayo-Galway border) it was that the Tuatha De Danann met and overthrew the Firbolgs. There has been handed down a poetical account of this great battle — a story that O’Curry says can hardly be less than fourteen hundred years old — which is very interesting, and wherein we get some quaint glimpses of ancient Irish ethics of war (for even in the most highly imaginative tale, the poets and seanachies of all times, unconsciously reflect the manners of their own age, or of ages just passed).”
― Seumas MacManus, The Story of the Irish Race: A Popular History of Ireland