Writing
He was the editor of The Burns Chronicle from 1976 to 1992 which under his stewardship reached a level of quality and diversity it has not achieved before or since. He then turned to biography, where he was less successful. Through the 1980s he worked on a biography of Robert Burns which was published in 1992 to favourable reviews and which won the Saltire Award. Subsequent biographies of Allan Pinkerton and William Wallace received more mixed reviews.
1996 saw the release of Michael Collins: A Life, a work about the life of the famed Irish revolutionary which received excellent reviews.
Mackay also wrote books under a number of different pseudonyms including Ian Angus, William Finlay, Bruce Garden, Alex Matheson and Peter Whittington.
Read more about this topic: James A. Mackay
Famous quotes containing the word writing:
“...I don’t have an inner drive to do as well as anybody else ... I have a great pleasure in writing and part of that is political and part of that is I’m surprised that I’ve done as well as I have. I really am just surprised.”
—Grace Paley (b. 1922)
“I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only
way that I can do it. Everybody is a real one to me,
everybody is like some one else too to me. No one of
them that I know can want to know it and so I write
for myself and strangers.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)