Gibbon, Lewis Grassic

▪ Scottish author

pseudonym of  James Leslie Mitchell  

born Feb. 13, 1901, Hillhead of Segget, Auchterless, Aberdeenshire, Scot.

died Feb. 7, 1935, Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, Eng.

      Scottish novelist whose inventive trilogy published under the collective title A Scots Quair (1946) made him a significant figure in the 20th-century Scottish Renaissance.

      Mitchell quit school at the age of 16 and worked as a junior reporter in Aberdeen and Glasgow before joining the Royal Army Service Corps in 1919. He was stationed at various posts in the Middle East. Discharged in 1923, he reenlisted in the Royal Air Force and worked as a clerk in England for six years. His first book, a work of nonfiction, was published in 1928. He published 17 more books—including fiction, short stories, and history—before his death six years later. With the exception of his trilogy and a book on Scotland (written with poet Hugh MacDiarmid), these books were published under his real name.

      Gibbon published Sunset Song—the first and perhaps best book of his famous trilogy—in 1932. It is notable for its masterful recreation of the rhythms and ring of Scots without resort to dialect spellings and Scots vocabulary. He followed Sunset Song with Cloud Howe (1933) and Grey Granite (1934). The novels follow the protagonist Chris Guthrie from her youth in the prewar Scottish countryside through postwar depression and economic and social crises; taken together they trace early 20th-century Scottish life in all “its sourness, its harshness, in its beauty, and its sorrow.” Of Gibbon's other works, only the quasi-autobiographical novel The Thirteenth Disciple (1931) and the novel Spartacus (1933) are of lasting interest.

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