Lewis Grassic Gibbon
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.
