Irish history is filled with the influences of gifted writers and poets. Increasing interest in Ireland's ancient Celtic culture influenced Irish writers, most significantly William Butler Yeats, whose work inspired a tremendous increase in modern Irish writing. Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923. Among the first Anglo-Irish writers to achieve literary success were the satirist, Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver's Travels (1726), the political thinker, Edmund Burke, and the dramatists, Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

In the late nineteenth century, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw produced major dramatic works. Shaw won the Nobel Prize in 1925. Another early 20th century writer, John Millington Synge, focused international attention on Irish drama with The Playboy of the Western World (1907). Finally, one of the most celebrated Irish authors was James Joyce, who left Ireland in the early years of the twentieth century and spent most of the rest of his life in Europe.