A. J. Cronin (Archibald Joseph Cronin) Biography

Scottish novelist, born into an Irish-Scottish Catholic family in Cardross, Dumbartonshire, and educated at the University of Glasgow, where he studied medicine. He served in the First World War as a surgeon sublieutenant with the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve; he then practised as a GP in Glasgow and London, and as a medical inspector of mines in South Wales. His first novel, Hatter's Castle (1931), set in a small Scottish town, combines a doomed love story with an account of the rise and fall of James Brodie, a hatter of overweening social ambition. The novel was hugely successful and established Cronin as a popular realist writer. Having given up medicine, Cronin produced a stream of bestsellers displaying the same narrative skill and humane spirit. The best known of these is The Citadel (1937), a moral tale of a young physician's struggles to retain his integrity against the attraction of world success. Other notable works are The Stars Look Down (1941) and The Keys of the Kingdom (1942). His later work tended to the sentimental, perhaps because his tax-exile in Switzerland distanced him from the Scottish people and landscape which were his best inspiration. Many of his novels were successfully filmed, and the long-running television series Dr Finlay's Casebook was based on his characters.