The Modern Novel

Biography

Gibbon – real name James Leslie Mitchell – is best known for his Scots Quair. It is rightly famous for being written in Scots vernacular and for giving a true Scottish voice to Scottish literature. Yet Gibbon had, till then, primarily written as an Englishman, with an English, rather than Scottish voice. He was born James Leslie Mitchell in 1901 in Arbuthnott in north-east Scotland. His father was a crofter. Gibbon never wanted to work on the land, despite his attachment to it, and determined to be a writer from an early age. He initially worked as a journalist but was fired for cheating on his expenses. In 1919, he enlisted in the Royal Army Service Corps and served in the Middle East. He returned home in 1923 and tried to earn work as a writer but was unable to do so, so he re-enlisted as a clerk and lived in England. He remained in England after his discharge in 1929 and, from that time, earned his living as a writer. He wrote his best-known work, the Scot Quair trilogy, in the early thirties but sadly died of a perforated gastric ulcer a year after the final volume appeared, in 1935.

Books about Lewis Grassic Gibbon

Ian Campbell: Lewis Grassic Gibbon
Ian S Munro: Leslie Mitchell: Lewis Grassic Gibbon

Other links

Lewis Grassic Gibbon Centre
Lewis Grassic Gibbon
Lewis Grassic Gibbon
Lewis Grassic Gibbon
Lewis Grassic Gibbon Poet of the Granite City
Lewis Grassic Gibbon (in Scots)
Lewis Grassic Gibbon (his grave)