Likened to Dickens, Cervantes and Turgenev, and described as "rising like a mountain over the men of his time, " Carleton was the first great fictional chronicler of the Irish people. That his writings succeeded in offending "every class of Irishmen" indicated the sometimes brutal candor with which he went about his work.This 1968 unfinished autobiography covers the first 28 rich, difficult years of his life, taking him from an idyllic childhood in the Clogher valley to a bed of rags and straw in Dublin, from which, equipped with only his genius and a powerful sense of destiny, the young Carleton went out upon the world.