LIFE:

Coming from a bourgeois family he first studies at the Royal Irish Academy of Music and at Trinity College where he degrees, then to Paris where he comes in contact with the symbolist atmosphere. He travels to France, Germany and Italy observing and meditating and coming then back to Paris where in 1897 he meets the poet William Butler Yeats. Synge shows to the poet some of his works about the French literature but Yeats finds them insufficient; but having immediately understood the great abilities and possibility of this young talent he exhorts him to leave Paris to go to live for some time in the Aran islands, off the Galway bay, in order to learn habits, traditions and language of the Gaelic people.
Synge in contact with that nature of incisive beauty, near those plain and primitive folk, definitively forms his temperament of man and writer. He writes The Aran Islands, 1907, kind of diary of his stay on the islands, and the dramas The Shadow of the Glen, 1903, Riders to the Sea, 1904 - translated in Italian by Joyce to be represented in Trieste - The Well of the Saints, 1905, The Tinkers Wedding, 1907, Playboy of the Western World, 1907, Deirdre of the Sorrow, 1910 posthumous and unfinished.
At the beginning he is criticised by Irish nationalists because he doesn't idealises enough his personages and Ireland and subsequently because he idealises them too much. In his works the language is very remarkable as is it possible to find English words in Gaelic syntactic shapes. 
In 1904 he becomes, with Yeats, director of the Abbey Theatre where he represents his works. He dies for cancer in Dublin in 1909. After his death Poems and Translations, 1909 with translations from Petrarca and Villon are published.

SUGGESTED WORKS:

The Aran Islands, 1907
His most famous work, written as kind of journal, tells his life experience of living in these remote islands on the West coast of Ireland. He describes Traditions and habits of the inhabitants of this community and tells their stories.

OTHER WORKS:

Riders to the sea, 1904
It's the fight between man and sea. The old Maurya has seen six of her sons dying for the fury of the sea, but she manages however to be serene and full of dignity in her pain. Nature can steal her everything but her personality. From this play the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams has written an Opera that is considered his masterpiece and that uses sounds of local folk songs.

Playboy of the Western World, 1907
He describes his fellow Irish citizens like people not only being able to kill but also to idealise the crime, who fear the Church and feel weak for this. The hero of this work can be seen like a parody of the Irish heroes of mythological saga. The first performance was hissed and criticised because it represents the stereotyped image that English have of the Irishes.

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