page_title: Neil M. Gunn
section_title: The professional writer
hierarchical_section_title: Neil M. Gunn / The professional writer
caption_attribution_description: English: Neil Gunn memorial above Strathpeffer
context_page_description: Neil Miller Gunn was a prolific novelist, critic, and dramatist who emerged as one of the leading lights of the Scottish Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. With over twenty novels to his credit, Gunn was arguably the most influential Scottish fiction writer of the first half of the 20th century.
  Like his contemporary, Hugh MacDiarmid, Gunn was politically committed to the ideals of both Scottish nationalism and socialism. His fiction deals primarily with the Highland communities and landscapes of his youth, though the author chose to write almost exclusively in English rather than Scots or Gaelic but was heavily influenced in his writing style by the language.
context_section_description: Following 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. He rented a farmhouse near Strathpeffer and embarked on his most productive period as a novelist and essayist. Butcher's Broom and The Silver Darlings are historical novels dealing with the Highland Clearances. Young Art and Old Hector and The Green Isle of the Great Deep are both fantasies based on Scottish folklore. Gunn's later works in the 1940s and into the 1950s became concerned with issues of totalitarianism.
caption: Part of the Neil Gunn memorial above Strathpeffer, erected by the Neil M. Gunn Memorial Trust.
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