A. J. Cronin was a novelist, dramatist, and nonfiction writer whose works examine moral conflicts between the individual and society as his idealistic heroes pursue justice for the common man. His moralistic novels are known by the public for their...

Patrick J. Cronin of Elgin A funeral Mass for Patrick J. Cronin, 58, will be celebrated at 10:30 a.m. Monday, at St. Mary's Catholic Church, 397 Fulton St., Elgin, with the Rev. Edward Seisser officiating. Born March 20, 1945, in Minneapolis, Minn.,...

WATERTOWN - Dr. Edward J. Cronin, 73, of Watertown, an optometrist in Brighton for more than 40 years, died Feb. 19 at the University of Maryland Medical Center, Baltimore. Dr. Cronin was a past president of the Brighton Lions Club. He was a...

Six years ago Dr. Cronin came in like a lion, to the fanfare of a critical acclaim that bracketed his name with those of Ibsen, Hardy and Charlotte Brontë. British fiction, so thin and nervous since the war, seemed a little more human. Here, it was generally felt, was a doctor who had deserted the surgery because of a genuine literary compulsion, a man whose first book was a solid and resounding tragedy, a writer who seemed able to plow his way through the sickliness and the corruption of trivial rea...

In "Grand Canary" we have the third venture by the author of "Hatter's Castle" and "Three Loves" in the field of fiction. A. J. Cronin, it will be recalled, is a London physician who has deserted medicine for the novel—not, we take it, because he likes medicine less, but because he likes authorship more. And just as "Three Loves" differed radically from "Hatter's Castle," so does the new narrative differ from both...

Given Dr. Cronin's considerable reputation and some fourteen titles on which it is based, [A Song of Sixpence] obviously requires a notice. It does not, however, deserve one. For this is a bad book, not in the sense of being a good book that has failed, but in the sense of being a second-rate book that does not meet the requirements of its lower estate. And the reason for this has something to do with the matters of honesty and sentiment, or—more simply—with honest sentimentality. The r...