Eric Linklater's career encompasses over one hundred titles dating from the 1920s and lasting until his death in 1974. Despite being most noted as an Orkney writer and a humorist, his work crosses various themes and genres. Not just a novelist of Scottish subjects, Linklater wrote a wide variety of texts ranging from adapted Norse saga and children's stories, to British histories and grim war-based fictions. An author with a versatile voice, his texts show a clear wit and a grand literary influence. Finding inspiration in older texts such as the works of Byron, Ben Jonson, Aristophanes, Rabelais and Fergusson, titles such as Juan in America, Magnus Merriman, White-Maa's Saga, The Dark of Summer and The Impregnable Women show a depth of knowledge for classic literature, an honesty of the times, and a clarity of voice that other writers of that era lacked. Linklater shunned contemporary experimental movements and wrote to entertain and enlighten, in a style that was as much literature as it was journalism.
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