The Essentials: Top 10 books about Ireland and the Irish

Jamshid Mousavinezhad | amNY.com

6:01 PM EST, March 4, 2008

Regardless of whether you think the Irish really saved civilization, there's no doubt books by and about the Irish are a pillar of literature. Here are some works to get you started.

George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (1913) Shaw would've hated how his look at the war between the sexes and the classes was sweetened and turned by Hollywood into My Fair Lady. But he would've liked the big paycheck.

James Joyce's Dubliners (1914) Until you can set aside a year to read Ulysses, Joyce's collection of 15 short stories -- culminating in The Dead -- is the perfect introduction to the acclaimed writer.

William Butler Yeats' Second Coming (1921) Even if you've never read this poem, its lines skip through our collective vocabulary: 'And what rough beast, its hour come round at last/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?'

Frank O'Connor's Guests of the Nation (1931) O'Connor's simply written short story about two Englishmen held hostage during the Irish Civil War juxtaposes human relationships with the destructiveness of war.

Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) Published under Brian O'Nolan's pen name, everything from Irish legends to collegiate drug use to a love child sets this influential experimental work a 'whirling.

Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh (1939) The New York-born playwright used the setting of a Greenwich Village bar to examine the haze that politics, alcohol and despair can cast over life.

Eavan Boland's In a Time of Violence (1995) This intimate collection of poems drawn from Boland's life and inspired by Ireland will rattle around in your head long after you've closed the slender volume.

Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes (1996) New Yorker Frank McCourt turned his hard-scrabble childhood years in Ireland into this Pulitzer-prize winning, unflinching look at poverty intertwined with faith.

Thomas Cahill's How the Irish Saved Civilization (1996) This non-fiction work argues if it weren't for Saint Patrick and monks in monasteries across Ireland, the fall of the Roman Empire would've led to an even darker Dark Ages.

Thomas Keneally's The Great Shame (1998) The author of Schindler's List chronicles the stories of Irish people in the diaspora, after famine, emigration, and transportation to Australia took them from their native land.