Maurice Walsh was born on April 21, 1879 in Ballydonoghue, near Listowel, County Kerry, Ireland. He was the third child and first son of John Walsh, a local farmer, and his wife Elizabeth. John Walsh's main interests were books and horses and he himself did little about the farm, preferring to have a hired man. The most famous of these was Paddy Bawn Enright, whose name was to be immortalised by Maurice Walsh in his story The Quiet Man (though the name was not used in the movie version). John Walsh passed on to his son not only a love of books but also legends and folk tales and the theory of place that were later to be a feature of many of Maurice's books.