Playwright, poet, and fantasy novelist Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett (1878-1957), 18th Baron of Dunsany was born in London to conservative MP John William Plunkett (1853 - 1899), later 17th Baron of Dunsany, and his wife Ernle Elizabeth Louisa Maria Grosvenor (1855-1916) in 1878. Dunsany initially entertained notions of serving as a conservative MP, standing for West Wiltshire in 1906, but soon abandoned politics in favor of literature, publishing his first short story collection, The Gods of Pegāna, in 1905. Dunsany remained staunchly unionist throughout his life, using his writings to critique De Valera and other Irish nationalists.

For a brief period following the death of J.M. Synge (1871 - 1909), W.B. Yeats (1865 - 1939) took on Dunsany as his protégé, encouraging his playwriting in particular, though the two would later have an acrimonious falling out. Dunsany later acquired his own protégés, such as Francis Ledwidge (1887 - 1917). While Dunsany’s many novels focused on evoking the landscape of the Irish countryside in Meath, eventually he left Dunsany itself to his son, retiring to Kent in 1946. Following his death from appendicitis in Dublin in 1957, Dunsany was buried in Kent.