SOURCE: "An Island World of Vastness: George Mackay Brown (1921–96)," in America, Vol. 175, No. 3, August 3, 1996, pp. 24-5.

In the following tribute, Feeney explores Brown's career, noting Seamus Heaney's remark that Brown could "transform everything by passing it through the eye of the needle of Orkney."

His work is craggy, granitic, primitive, as stark as the wind-seared rock of his native Orkney. Rarely leaving the "oystergrey" islands north of northmost Scotland, George Mackay Brown found there a world of local vastness, where he word-carved novels, stories and poems about prows and rudders, "sea sounds" and stars, wars and murders, and island chieftains for whom "Roots / cried, stars sang, / gulls wrote a name in the air and in water."

Though Brown thought himself a mere craftsman, his death this year in Kirkwall, Orkney's capital, brought tributes proper to an artist. In London, The Tablet called him "a giant of literature and...