This book concerns Toms OCrohan of the Blasket Islands and offers a radical reinterpretation of this iconic Irish figure and his place in Gaelic literature. It examines the politics of Irish culture that turned OCrohan into The Islandman and harnessed his texts to the national political project presenting him as an instinctual natural hero and a nave almost unwilling writer and his texts as artefacts of unselfconscious unmediated linguistic and ethnographic authenticity. The author demonstrates that such misleading claims never properly scrutinised before this study have been to the detriment of the authors literary reputation and that they have obscured the deeply personal and highly idiosyncratic purpose and nature of his writing.