Charles Murray

Charles Murray (1864–1941) was a poet who wrote in the Doric dialect of Scots. He was born and raised in Alford in north east Scotland. However he wrote much of his poetry while living in South Africa where he spent most of his working life as a successful civil engineer. His first volume, A Handful of Heather (1893), was privately printed and he withdrew it shortly after publication to rework many of the poems within it. His second volume, Hamewith (1900), was much more successful. It was republished five times before he died and it is this volume for which he is best known. The title of the volume, which means Homewards in English, reflects his expatriate situation.

He served in the Armed Forces during the Boer War and the First World War and in 1917 produced the volume, The Sough o' War. In 1920 he published his last volume, In the Country Places. After his death a final volume of poetry, Last Poems was published by the Charles Murray Memorial Trust in 1969.

He returned to Scotland when he retired in 1924 and settled in Banchory, not far from where he was brought up. There he died in 1941.

For examples of his poetry see

Charles Murray (1943-) is the Bradley Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of Losing Ground (1984), What it Means to be a Libertarian (1997), and co-author with Richard Herrnstein of The Bell Curve (1994). Murray is a critic of deconstruction (see Stanley Fish).