John Galt: The life of a writer

by Ian Alistair Gordon

0802019412

170 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Professor Ian Alistair Gordon graduated from the University of Edinburgh and taught there before his appointment to the Chair of English Language and Literature at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, a position he held from 1936 to 1974. He was instrumental in establishing the study of the structure, history, and use of English, and the teaching of the English language at the University.

Reviews

[Martyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing. When I read the introduction to The Works of John Galt (the 1936 ten-volume edition), Galt came across as a man who had lived a very interesting life, but that introduction didn't go into enough details and seemed very inadequate and left one longing to know more. But this book also feels inadequate - but doesn't leave one longing to know more. It's not a comprehensive biography such as I was hoping for. Instead the writer chose to focus specifically on the life of Galt as a writer, largely pushing all other aspects of his life into the background, except in so far as they directly affected his writing, and yet it was all that other stuff that I had been interested to find out more about. So it failed to supply. But what information it did provide about his life and activities outside of writing didn't inspire me and leave me wanting to find out more about him – you could say it rather killed my interest in Galt. Maybe I hope that effect will wear off with time and in the future I might be tempted to get a different biography, or Galt's autobiography. I can't help feeling that I would have found it more satisfying if Gordon hadn't bothered writing this book at all but instead had just reprinted all the extant exchanges of letters between Galt and his publishers Blackwood and Oliver & Boyd in full. The full letters might have contained information, or tone, which brought Galt to life far more than Gordon's re-hash of that information did.

But if the book failed as a biography, failed to interest you in Galt as a man, it did leave you frustratingly longing for a new and complete edition of Galt's works. Gordon was drawing attention to so many of Galt's writings which have never been reprinted since they were first published, and you just wished that he could have spent his time producing such a collected edition instead of wasting time writing this particular book.

One of my chief reasons for being interested in Galt was the fact that he had lived in Greenock, and yet aside from passing mentions that that was where he was living or visiting at various points, I found out next to nothing about his life in Greenock at all. So as I say, disappointing, inadequate, falling way short of what I was hoping for and what I think it could have been if Gordon had chosen to expand his parameters and given us more of the man and less of the writer, or rather, just more of the man, to balance out and flesh out the writer and give a fuller picture.