Neil Miller Gunn was born into a warm and traditional Highland society that, during his lifetime, was visibly dying. He lived in the Highlands, drew nourishment from his roots in the Highlands and set his stories in the Highlands, yet he was never merely a regional novelist; he wrote of the whole universe of man and "the other landscape" of the mind.

In 1926, on the evidence of his first novel, C. M. Grieve made the forecast that Gunn would "take rank as the foremost of living Scottish novelists"; when Morning Tide was published in 1931, John Buchan described it as "one of the most remarkable pieces of literature which in recent years have come out of Scotland"; Kurt Wittig wrote in The Scottish Tradition in Literature (1958) "that modern Scottish fiction reached its peak in the novels of Neil M. Gunn"; and Francis Russell Hart devotes more space to Gunn...