This book carefully examines representative texts and events that reflect the Irish presence in American culture from the Famine to the present. A noted scholar in the field of Irish-American literature and history, Jack Morgan sets forth and analyzes a wealth of material previously unexamined with clarity and insight. Writers from Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller, to Harold Frederic and Sarah Orne Jewett, are considered in terms of their engagement with and relationships to the new Irish arrivals in the nineteenth century. Through a variety of texts, lives, and events, this study unfolds a fascinating panorama of Irish-American history, culture, and popular culture.