Best known under his pseudonym, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, James Leslie Mitchell ranks with Hugh MacDiarmid and Neil Gunn as a central figure of the Scottish literary renaissance. As Gibbon, Mitchell wrote the trilogy A Scots Quair (1946), which Kurt Wittig in The Scottish Tradition in Literature calls "the most ambitious single effort in Scottish fiction." But besides the trilogy Mitchell also wrote seven "English" novels, two short-story collections, a biography of the explorer Mungo Park, five works of nonfiction dealing with exploration, and, with Hugh MacDiarmid, a collection of essays and short stories; all published within seven years.

Born in 1901 in Aberdeenshire, in "that most peasant of all Scotland's provinces, the North-East," Mitchell was the third of three sons of James McIntosh Mitchell, a crofter, and Lilias Gibbon Mitchell. He spent his childhood in the rural areas of Kincardineshire, but even as a boy Mitchell felt a strong ambivalence...