LIFE AND THE DREAM (454 pp.)Mary ColumDoubleday ($3.50).
Once upon a time Mary Colum was Mary Maguire, Irish, red-haired and 18. "I got on the Dublin train," she says, "in my new blue ankle-length dress, my dead mother's watch fastened to a long chain and stuck in my belt. Attached to the chain was a silver Child of Mary medal and a ... silver cross, and nobody, not even a native of central Africa, could have failed to recognize in me the typical product of a convent school."
Bound for four university years, she stepped off the train "right into the Irish Revival."...