[2] His best-known novel is The Citadel (1937), about a Scottish physician who serves in a Welsh mining village before achieving success in London, where he becomes disillusioned about the venality and incompetence of some doctors.

Cronin was not only a precocious student at Dumbarton Academy,[5] who won prizes in writing competitions, but an excellent athlete and association footballer.

During the First World War, Cronin served as a surgeon sub-lieutenant in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve before graduating from medical school.

He subsequently moved to London, where he practised in Harley Street before opening a busy medical practice of his own in Notting Hill.

At Dalchenna Farm by Loch Fyne he was finally able to indulge a lifelong desire to write a novel, having previously "written nothing but prescriptions and scientific papers.

Cronin's works examine moral conflicts between the individual and society, as his idealistic heroes pursue justice for the common man.

One of his early novels, The Stars Look Down (1935), chronicles transgressions in a mining community in north-east England and an ambitious miner's rise to be a Member of Parliament (MP).

[7] He was known to be tough in business dealings, although in private life he was a person whose "pawky humour... peppered his conversations," according to one of his editors, Peter Haining.

During the Second World War he worked for the British Ministry of Information, writing articles as well as participating in radio broadcasts to foreign countries.

The Citadel (1937), a tale of a doctor's struggle to balance scientific integrity with social obligations, helped to promote the establishment of the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom by exposing the inequity and incompetence of medical practice at the time.

In the novel, Cronin advocated a free public health service to defeat the wiles of doctors who "raised guinea-snatching and the bamboozling of patients to an art form.

Cronin's novel, which became the highest-selling book ever published by Gollancz, informed the public about corruption in the medical system, which eventually led to reform.

Not only were the author's pioneering ideas instrumental in creating the NHS, but according to the historian Raphael Samuel, the popularity of Cronin's novels played a major role in the Labour Party's landslide victory in 1945.

A few of the more vociferous medical practitioners of the day took exception to one of its many messages: that a few well-heeled doctors in fashionable practices were unethically extracting large amounts of money from their equally well-off patients.

In the United States The Citadel won the National Book Award, Favorite Fiction of 1937, voted by members of the American Booksellers Association.

At medical school, as he recounts in his autobiography, he had become an agnostic: "When I thought of God it was with a superior smile, indicative of biological scorn for such an outworn myth."

During his practice in Wales, however, the deep religious faith of the people he worked among made him start to wonder whether "the compass of existence held more than my text-books had revealed, more than I had ever dreamed of.

The speaker, adopting "a frankly atheistic approach", described the sequence of events leading to the emergence, "though he did not say how," of the first primitive life-form from lifeless matter.

With his stories being adapted for Hollywood films, Cronin and his family moved to the United States in 1939, living in Bel Air, California, Nantucket, Massachusetts, Greenwich, Connecticut, and Blue Hill, Maine.

[15] In 1945, the Cronins sailed back to England aboard the RMS Queen Mary, staying briefly in Hove and then in Raheny, Ireland, before returning to the US the following year.

Although the latter part of his life was spent entirely abroad, Cronin retained great affection for the district of his childhood, writing in 1972 to a local teacher: "Although I have travelled the world over I must say in all sincerity that my heart belongs to Dumbarton....