page_title: Padraic Colum
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Padraic Colum / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: Drawing of Irish poet Padraic Colum by John Butler Yeats.
context_page_description: Padraic Colum was an Irish poet, novelist, dramatist, biographer, playwright, children's author and collector of folklore. He was one of the leading figures of the Irish Literary Revival.
context_section_description: Colum was born Patrick Columb in a County Longford workhouse, where his father worked. He was the first of eight children born to Patrick and Susan Columb. When the father lost his job in 1889, he moved to the United States to participate in the Colorado gold rush. Padraic and his mother and siblings remained in Ireland, having moved to live with his grandmother in County Cavan. When the father returned in 1892, the family moved to Glasthule, near Dublin, where his father was employed as Assistant Manager at Sandycove and Glasthule railway station. His son attended the local national school.
  When Susan Columb died in 1907, the family was temporarily split up. Padraic (as he would be known) and one brother remained in Dublin, while their father and remaining children moved back to Longford. Colum finished school the following year and at the age of seventeen, he passed an exam for and was awarded a clerkship in the Irish Railway Clearing House. He stayed in this job until 1903.
  During this period, Colum started to write and met a number of the leading Irish writers of the time, including W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and Æ. He also joined the Gaelic League and was a member of the first board of the Abbey Theatre. He became a regular user of the National Library of Ireland, where he met James Joyce and the two became lifelong friends. During the riots caused by the Abbey Theatre's production of The Playboy of the Western World, Padraic Colum's father, Patrick Columb, was one of the protestors. Padraic himself was not engaged in the protests, although he did pay his father's fine afterwards.
  He was awarded a five-year scholarship by a wealthy American benefactor, Thomas Hughes Kelly. He used it to read, study and write. He did not attend University College Dublin, or any other University as a student.
caption: Portrait drawing of Colum by John B. Yeats, 1900s
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