This text showed the influence which a reading of Eugen Herrigel's Zen in the Art of Archery had upon Gunn. Gunn's final full-length work was a discursive autobiography entitled The Atom of Delight. Gunn's later works in the 1940s and into the 1950s became concerned with issues of totalitarianism. Young Art and Old Hector and The Green Isle of the Great Deep are both fantasies based on Scottish folklore. Butcher's Broom and The Silver Darlings are historical novels dealing with the Highland Clearances. He rented a farmhouse near Strathpeffer and embarked on his most productive period as a novelist and essayist. Gunn Memorial Trust.įollowing the publishing success of Highland River (for which he was awarded the 1937 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction), Gunn was able to resign from the Customs and Excise in 1937 and become a full-time writer. Part of the Neil Gunn memorial above Strathpeffer, erected by the Neil M. During this period, Gunn was active in the National Party of Scotland, which formed part of what became the Scottish National Party. The first novels Gunn published were The Grey Coast in 1926 and The Lost Glen in 1928. His writing brought him into contact with other writers associated with the budding Scottish Renaissance, such as Hugh MacDiarmid, James Bridie, Naomi Mitchison, Eric Linklater, Edwin Muir, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, and George Blake.īlake and George Malcolm Thomson were running the Porpoise Press, whose mission was to reestablish a national publishing industry for Scotland, by now an imprint of Faber & Faber, and they became Gunn's publisher in the early 1930s. Beginnings as a writer ĭuring the 1920s Gunn began to publish short stories, as well as poems and short essays, in various literary magazines. ![]() Gunn married Jessie Dallas Frew in 1921 and they settled in Inverness, near his permanent excise post at the Glen Mhor distillery. He would remain a customs officer throughout the First World War and until he was well established as a writer in 1937. In 1910 Gunn became a Customs and Excise Officer and was posted back to the Highlands. This led to a move to London, where the adolescent Gunn was exposed to both the exciting world of new political and philosophical ideas as well as to the seamier side of modern urban life. He continued his education there with tutors including the local schoolmaster, and the writer and poet J.G.Carter " Theodore Mayne". Keiller, the local GP at Kenbank in St John's Town of Dalry, Kirkcudbrightshire. Gunn had eight siblings, and when his primary schooling was completed in 1904, he moved south to live with his older sister Mary and her husband Dr. His mother would also provide Gunn with a crucial model for the types of steadfast, earthy, and tradition-bearing women that would populate many of his works. His father was the captain of a herring boat, and Gunn's fascination with the sea and the courage of fishermen can be traced directly back to his childhood memories of his father's work. ![]() Neil Miller Gunn was born in the village of Dunbeath, Caithness. His fiction deals primarily with the Highland communities and landscapes of his youth, : 325 though the author chose ( contra MacDiarmid and his followers) to write almost exclusively in English rather than Scots or Gaelic but was heavily influenced in his writing style by the language. ![]() Like his contemporary, Hugh MacDiarmid, Gunn was politically committed to the ideals of both Scottish nationalism and socialism (a difficult balance to maintain for a writer of his time). ![]() With over twenty novels to his credit, Gunn was arguably the most influential Scottish fiction writer of the first half of the 20th century (with the possible exception of Lewis Grassic Gibbon, the pen name of James Leslie Mitchell). Neil Miller Gunn (8 November 1891 – 15 January 1973) was a prolific novelist, critic, and dramatist who emerged as one of the leading lights of the Scottish Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |