Gibbon, Lewis Grassic (1901-1935)

Scottish novelist. He was the author of the trilogy A Scots Quair, comprising Sunset Song, Cloud Howe, and Grey Granite (1932-34), set in the Mearns, south of Aberdeen, where he was born and brought up. Under his real name he wrote anthropological works and novels, which included Stained Radiance (1930) and Spartacus (1933).

Gibbon worked as a journalist in Aberdeen, became a communist, and served in the Middle East during World War I. In 1928 he published Hanno: or the Future of Exploration and after leaving the forces in 1929 he lived by writing until his death. Other books were Niger, The Life of Mungo Park, and The Conquest of the Maya (1934). Diffusionism and the need to recover the lost ‘Golden Age’ pervade his novels Three Go Back (1932) and Spartacus, a powerful historical work. It was under his pseudonym, however, that he made his major contribution to Scottish literature in A Scots Quair. Ostensibly a story of a Scots peasant's education, series of marriages, and her son's involvement in the working-class struggle, it is also an analysis of the transition from a rural to an industrial economy, with its social consequences, and, at a third level, an allegory of Scottish history with the heroine personifying Scotland.