Mackenzie continued to edit the magazine until 1961. In 1923 he and his brother-in-law Christopher Stone founded Gramophone, the still-influential classical music magazine. In 1922, Robin Legge, chief music critic of The Daily Telegraph, encouraged Mackenzie to write some of the earliest gramophone record reviews.
After his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1914, Mackenzie explored religious themes in a trilogy of novels, The Altar Steps (1922), The Parson's Progress (1923) and The Heavenly Ladder (1924).
Sir John Betjeman said of it, "This has always seemed to me one of the best novels of the best period in English novel writing." Henry James thought it to be the most remarkable book written by a young author in his lifetime. Frank Swinnerton, a literary critic, comments on Mackenzie's "detail and wealth of reference". Max Beerbohm praised Mackenzie's writing for vividness and emotional reality. Sinister Street, his lengthy 1913–14 Bildungsroman, influenced George Orwell and Cyril Connolly, who both read it as schoolboys. Scott Fitzgerald, whose first book, This Side of Paradise, was written under the literary influence of Compton. Of his fiction, The Four Winds of Love is sometimes considered his magnum opus.
He wrote history (on the Battle of Marathon and the Battle of Salamis), biography ( Mr Roosevelt, a 1943 biography of FDR), literary criticism, satires, apologia ( Sublime Tobacco 1957), children's stories, poetry and so on. He published almost a hundred books on different subjects, including ten volumes of autobiography: My Life and Times (1963–71). They were the sources of a successful film and a television series respectively. Mackenzie is perhaps best known for two comic novels set in Scotland: Whisky Galore (1947) set in the Hebrides, and The Monarch of the Glen (1941) set in the Scottish Highlands. He was educated at St Paul's School, London, and Magdalen College, Oxford, from where he graduated with a degree in Modern History. His father, Edward Compton Mackenzie, and mother, Virginia Frances Bateman, were actors and theatre company managers his sister, Fay Compton (whose son was Anthony Pelissier, Compton's nephew), starred in many of J.
He was knighted in 1952.Įdward Montague Compton Mackenzie was born in West Hartlepool, County Durham, England, into a theatrical family of Mackenzies, many of whose members used Compton as their stage surname, starting with his English grandfather Henry Compton, a well-known Shakespearean actor of the Victorian era. He was one of the co-founders in 1928 of the National Party of Scotland along with Hugh MacDiarmid, R. Sir Edward Montague Compton Mackenzie, OBE (17 January 1883 – 30 November 1972) was a Scottish writer of fiction, biography, histories and a memoir, as well as a cultural commentator, raconteur and lifelong Scottish nationalist.
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