A. J. Cronin
born July 19, 1896, Cardross,
Dumbartonshire, Scot.
died Jan. 6, 1981,
Montreux, Switz.
Scottish novelist and physician whose works
combining realism with social criticism won a
large Anglo-American readership.
Cronin
was educated at the University of Glasgow and
served as a surgeon in the Royal Navy during
World War I. He practiced in South Wales
(1921–24) and then, as medical inspector of
mines, investigated occupational diseases in the
coal industry. He opened medical practice in
London in 1926 but quit because of ill health,
using his leisure to write his first novel,
Hatter’s Castle (1931; filmed 1941), the story
of a Scottish hatmaker obsessed with the idea of
the possibility of his noble birth. This book
was an immediate success in Britain.
Cronin’s fourth novel, The Stars Look Down
(1935; filmed 1939), which chronicles various
social injustices in a North England mining
community from 1903 to 1933, gained him an
international readership. It was followed by The
Citadel (1937; filmed 1938), which showed how
private physicians’ greed can distort good
medical practice. The Keys of the Kingdom (1942;
filmed 1944), about a Roman Catholic missionary
in China, was one of his most popular books.
Cronin’s subsequent novels include The Green
Years (1944; filmed 1946), Shannon’s Way (1948),
The Judas Tree (1961), and A Song of Sixpence
(1964). One of his more interesting late works
is A Thing of Beauty (1956), a study of a gifted
young painter who must break free of
middle-class conventions to realize his
potential.
Cronin’s strengths were his narrative skill and
his powers of acute observation and graphic
description. Though labeled a successful
middlebrow novelist, he managed to create in The
Stars Look Down a classic work of 20th-century
British fiction.
