We have come a long way from the account of Neil Gunn as a writer ‘at his best when describing the ordinary life and background of a crofting community and when he interprets in simple prose the complex character of the Celt’. Gunn was himself a complex character, whether or not he could be defined as a Celt, and one capable of a vital and refreshing simplicity. But he did not set out merely to describe in simple prose the life and background of a crofting community. He wrote in order to make a living, to rid himself of frustrations, and to get at the truth about a world which is not a simple place.

Living in the Highlands did not make him ‘provincial’ in any sense. He was fully aware of the movements in world literature, and of the political and social developments which endangered civilization itself. Distance from the urban illusion of control over affairs seemed to add clarity to the view.

Not only was he involved with the Scottish literary renaissance, and at one time or another friendly with Hugh MacDiarmid, Edwin Muir, James Bridie, Eric Linklater, Naomi Mitchison, George Blake and many others, but he read widely among the modernists, mentioning in The Atom of Delight Proust, Yeats, Rilke, Eliot, Robert Graves, Lawrence, as well as thinkers such as J. G. Frazer, Freud, Jung, Lao Tzu, and the Zen Buddhists (in whom he became particularly interested), as well as a number of Western philosophers and several physicists. But he also makes use of folk tale, myth, legend, and celebrates the ancient culture of his own people with its unique store of music, song, and story.

It could be said that there is technical modernism in Highland River, The Key of the Chest, The Shadow and The Other Landscape, which proves only that he was neither traditionalist nor deliberate innovator, but sought a personal solution to problems of every kind at every level.

The writers he found most companionable (a favourite word) were not as a rule the most fashionable at the time, but individualists like himself – the sly, anarchistic maverick John Cowper Powys; the profound and sardonic Icelander Halldor Laxness; the highly philosophical L. H. Myers; the English traditional novelist R. C. Hutchinson; the poets Norman MacCaig, Edwin Muir and Stewart Conn; R. H. Blyth's translations of haiku, and so on.