Compton Mackenzie
Sir Edward Montague Compton Mackenzie, OBE (17 January 1883 – 30 November 1972) was an English-born Scottish writer of fiction, biography, histories, and a memoir, as well as a cultural commentator, raconteur and lifelong Scottish nationalist. He w
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Sir Edward Montague Compton Mackenzie, OBE (17 January 1883 – 30 November 1972) was an English-born Scottish writer of fiction, biography, histories, and a memoir, as well as a cultural commentator, raconteur and lifelong Scottish nationalist. He was one of the co-founders in 1928 of the Scottish National Party along with Hugh MacDiarmid, RB Cunninghame Graham, and John MacCormick. He was knighted in 1952. Sir Compton Mackenzie is perhaps best known for two comic novels set in Scotland: Whisky Galore (1947) set in the Hebrides and The Monarch of the Glen (1941) set in the Scottish Highlands. They were the sources of a successful film and a television series respectively. He published almost a hundred books on different subjects, including ten volumes of autobiography: My Life and Times (1963–71). He wrote history (on the Battle of Marathon and the Battle of Salamis), biography (Mr. Roosevelt, a 1943 biography of FDR), literary criticism, satires, apologia (Sublime Tobacco 1957), children's stories, poetry and so on. Of his fiction, The Four Winds of Love is sometimes considered his magnum opus.
He was admired by F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose first book, This Side of Paradise, was written under the literary influence of Compton.
Sinister Street, his lengthy 1913–14 bildungsroman, influenced such young men as George Orwell and Cyril Connolly, who both read it as schoolboys. Max Beerbohm praised Mackenzie's writing for vividness and emotional reality. Frank Swinnerton, a literary critic, comments on Mackenzie's "detail and wealth of reference". John Betjeman said of it, "This has always seemed to me one of the best novels of the best period in English novel writing." Henry James thought it to be the most remarkable book written by a young author in his lifetime.
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