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 Scottishfiction 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.
Early life
Neil Miller Gunn was born in the village of Dunbeath, Caithness. His father was the captain of a herring boat, and Gunn's fascination with the sea and the courage of fishermen can be traced directly back to his childhood memories of his father's work. His mother would also provide Gunn with a crucial model for the types of steadfast, earthy, and tradition-bearing women that would populate many of his works. Gunn had eight siblings, and when his primary schooling was completed in 1904, he moved south to live with his older sister Mary and her husband Dr. Keiller, the local GP at Kenbank in St John's Town of Dalry, Kirkcudbrightshire. He continued his education there with tutors including the local schoolmaster, and the writer and poet J.G.Carter "TheodoreMayne". He sat the Civil Service exam in 1907. This led to a move to London, where the adolescent Gunn was exposed to both the exciting world of new political and philosophical ideas as well as to the seamier side of modern urban life. In 1910 Gunn became a Customs and Excise Officer and was posted back to the Highlands. He would remain a customs officer throughout the First World War and until he was well established as a writer in 1937.
Following the publishing success of Highland River, 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.
Gunn's final full-length work was a discursive autobiography entitled The Atom of Delight. This text showed the influence which a reading of Eugen Herrigel's Zen in the Art of Archery had upon Gunn. His utilisation of these ideas was not so much mystical as providing a view of the individual in a "small self-contained community, with a long-established way of life, with actions and responses known and defined". He took the playing of fiddlereels as an example: "how a human hand could perform, on its own, truly astonishing feats – astonishing in the sense that if thought interfered for a moment the feat was destroyed". This thought-free state could be a source of delight. In his later years, Gunn was involved in broadcasting and also published in diverse journals such as Anarchy Magazine in London, The Glasgow Herald, Holiday, Saltire Review, Scotland's Magazine, Scots Review, and Point magazine in Leicester. In his later years Gunn lived on the Black Isle. He died in Raigmore Hospital in Inverness on 15 January 1973, aged 81.
Legacy
Gunn is commemorated in Makars' Court, outside the Writers' Museum, Lawnmarket, Edinburgh. Selections for Makars' Court are made by the Writers' Museum; the Saltire Society; the Scottish Poetry Library. The Neil Gunn Trust was established in 1986, and in October 1987 a monument to the writer was unveiled on the Heights of Brae, Strathpeffer. The Neil Gunn Writing Competition was established in 1988 by Ross & Cromarty District Council and the Trust. The competition is now organised by High Life Highland and the Trust.
