two years, among them Anthony and Anna (1926) and The First Mrs. Fraser (1929). In 1936 Ervine's Boyd's Shop, "the play that defined Northern Irish drama for decades", was produced. Arnold Bennett hailed him as a playwright "unequalled" in England, with plays that "combined great skill, fine ideals, and perfect sincerity with immense popular success". From 1919 to 1939 Ervine was also a theatre reviewer for The Observer. Alongside his plays Ervine wrote a number of novels. Of these the most successful, The Wayward Man (1927), was reprinted in 1936 as one of Allen Lane's first Penguin paperbacks (Penguin 32). He also produced several major biographies, including of the Unionist leaders Craigavon and Carson, of William Booth, of Oscar Wilde and of George Bernard Shaw. Bernard Shaw: His Life, Work, and Friends (1956) was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1956. Explaining the determination of his character Robert "Darkie" Dunwoody in his novel, The Wayward Man, to leave the city despite the ties that bind him, Ervine wrote "I have never met anyone who was not depressed by Belfast". Sean O'Faolain accounted Ervine "the only Belfast writer who has tried at all to bottle the 'realism' of the city". He suggested, however, that, "lacking poetry", Ervine "only succeeded in making it taste like reboiled mutton gone cold". As "part of what might be called a programme for the reinstatement of certain neglected Northern Irish novelists", The Wayward Man was republished in 2014. Patricia Craig proposes that it is an exemplar of "a kind of Edwardian realism nurtured in the shade of Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy, and embodying a distinctive Ulster Protestant strain". By the 1940s St John Ervine was Northern Ireland's leading writer but also a controversial figure with “a remarkable antipathy to southern Ireland". He died in 1971. Selected Plays Mixed Marriage (1910) The Magnanimous Lover (1912) The Critics (1913) Jane Clegg (1913) The Orangeman (1914) John Ferguson (1915) The Island of Saints and How to Get Out of It (1920) The Ship (1922) The First Mrs. Fraser (1929) Boyd's Shop (1936) William John Mawhinny (1940) Friends and Relations (1941) My Brother Tom (1952) Ballyfarland's Festival (1953) Martha (1955) A contemporary production of Mixed Marriage played at the Finborough Theatre in London from 4 to 29 October 2011, to critical acclaim. Novels Mrs Martin's Man (1914) Changing Winds (1917) Foolish Letters (1920) The Wayward Man (1927)