WOULD THE WORLD BE BETTER OFF WITHOUT CRONIN?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 122, 24 October 1941, Page 8

WOULD THE WORLD BE BETTER OFF WITHOUT CRONIN?

best-selling novel and film, A. J. Cronin’s famous medical novel The Citadel has been dramatised | for radio by. the Australian B.A.P. | studios, and it has already started from | Stations 1ZB and 2ZB. It starts from | 3ZB next Sunday, October 26, from 4ZB } on November 2 and from 2ZA, Palmer- | ston North, on November 9. It plays at 9.0 every Sunday evening. The story of The Citadel is already familiar to the many thousands who have read the book and seen the film, and it will become familiar to many more as it unfolds over the air. The story of A. J. Cronin himself, however, is not so well known. He was born in 1896 in Cardross, Scotland, and his boyhood was fatherless ‘and heavy with poverty. He escaped with the aid of Carnegie Foundation scholarships and of his uncle, a humble Catholic priest, who served as model for the central character of his latest book, The Keys of the Kingdom, By working himself to physical exhaustion, Cronin became a doctor, but he had not been practising long when he discovered that he really wanted to be a writer. His first novel, Hatter’s Castle, sold over 70,000 copies, which is an excellent showing for a first venture, and enabled him to give up medicine. He has not practised since, | A bes a highly successful career as |

After Hatter’s Castle came a series of best sellers, from The Stars Look Down to The Citadel to The Keys of the Kingdom, which even before it had reached the general public in America, had advance sales of 250,000, chiefly through the Book of the Month Club. Cronin usually take three to five months to write his novels, though mést of them have been germinating in’ his mind for years. He writes with a fountain pen, and admits that for him creative effort is a " grey monotony of hell" punctuatéd by outbursts of frayed nerves. His three sons often wonder if the world wouldn’t be better off without authors. Mrs. Cronin, who is a doctor herself, and who has a remarkable memory for names, places, and dates, checks his manuscripts for errors, Since 1939, Cronin has Been living in the United States, writing articles and making speeches for the British Ministry of Information. In appearance he is slight and sandy haired, with white eyebrows and eyelashes, and is completely unaffected and sincere. ; The radio dramatisation of The Citadel has been expertly done, and with a minimum of alteration to the text of the

novel. The cast includes a number of Australian radio players whose voices are familiar to New Zealanders. Dr. Manson is played by Ronald Morse; Dr. Page’s sister by the Sydney actress, Ethel Lang; Christine Manson by Neva Carr-Glynn;; and Phillip Denny by Arundel Nixon, Others in the cast are Harvey Adams, Lou Vernon, te Barbour and John Tait.