Compton Mackenzie - Writing

Writing

Sir Compton Mackenzie is perhaps best known for two comedies set in Scotland, the Hebridean Whisky Galore (1947) and the Highland The Monarch of the Glen (1941), 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 (1963–1971). He also wrote history (on Marathon and Salamis), biography (Mr Roosevelt, 1943, a 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 to be his magnum opus. It is described by Dr. John MacInnes (formerly of the School of Scottish Studies) as "one of the greatest works of English literature produced in the twentieth century."

He was an influence on the young F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose first book, This Side of Paradise, was written while under his spell. Sinister Street, his lengthy 1913-14 bildungsroman, influenced the young and impressed established writers. Against the rules, George Orwell and Cyril Connolly read it as schoolboys. Max Beerbohm praised Mackenzie's writing for vividness and emotional reality Frank Swinnerton, 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.

Following his conversion to Catholicism in 1914, he explored religious themes in a trilogy of novels, The Altar Steps (1922), The Parson's Progress (1923), and The Heavenly Ladder (1924). Following his time on Capri, socialising with the gay exiles there, he treated the homosexuality of a politician sensitively in Thin Ice (1956).

He was the literary critic for the London-based national newspaper Daily Mail.