A. J. Cronin

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Image:AJCronin3.jpg A. J. Cronin is the pen-name of the Scottish novelist Archibald Joseph Cronin (July 19, 1896–January 9, 1981). He is remembered chiefly as the author of The Citadel and The Keys of the Kingdom, both of which were translated into Oscar-nominated films. His Dr. Finlay stories, which were based on scenes from his autobiography, Adventures in Two Worlds, became a long-running BBC drama series.

Born in Cardross, Dunbartonshire (now in Argyll and Bute), Scotland, Cronin was the only child of a Catholic father and a Protestant mother and would later often write of young men from similarly mixed backgrounds. He was a precocious student at Dumbarton Academy and won many writing competitions. Due to his exceptional abilities, he was awarded a scholarship to study medicine at the University of Glasgow. It was there that he met his future wife, Agnes Mary Gibson, who was also a medical student. He graduated with honours from medical school in 1919 and went on to earn additional advanced degrees.

Cronin trained as a doctor in various hospitals before serving as a Royal Navy surgeon during World War I, like the medical hero of his novel Shannon's Way. After the war he set up a practice in a mining area of South Wales and was appointed Medical Inspector of Mines. He drew on his experiences researching the deleterious effects of the mining industry on the workers' health for his later novels The Citadel, set in Wales, and The Stars Look Down, set in northeastern England. He subsequently moved to London and had a very successful practice on Harley Street. While on holiday in the Scottish Highlands, Cronin wrote his first novel, Hatter's Castle, with which he achieved instant success. It tells the story of a family brought to ruin by the pride, stubbornness and bigotry of its patriarch.

Many of Cronin's books were bestsellers that were translated into numerous languages. His strengths were his narrative skill and his powers of acute observation and graphic description. Some of his novels and stories draw on his medical career, dramatically mixing realism, romance, and social criticism. The Citadel is said to have contributed to the establishment of the National Health Service in the United Kingdom by exposing the injustice, exploitation and incompetence of medical practice at the time.

In the late 1930s Cronin moved to the United States with his wife and three sons, eventually settling in New Canaan, Connecticut. He later returned to Europe and for the last twenty-five years of his life lived in Switzerland, continuing to write into his eighties and basing novels like The Judas Tree partly in his new home. He died on January 9, 1981, in Montreux, Switzerland.

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