author

Robert Aitken

1872–1929

A Scottish-born novelist who published lively popular fiction in the early 1900s, he wrote adventures and romances with titles like A Million a Minute, The Man in the Mirror, and The White Blackbird. Writing under the name Robert Aitken, he built a small but memorable shelf of entertaining Edwardian novels.

1 Audiobook

The White Blackbird

The White Blackbird

by Robert Aitken

About the author

Born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1872, he published fiction as Robert Aitken, though later reference sources identify him as Robert Aitken Swan and note that he legally became Aitken-Swan in 1921. He died in Mortree, France, in 1929.

His books appeared in the first decade of the twentieth century and into the 1910s. Surviving bibliographic records list novels including The Golden Horseshoe (1907), A Million a Minute (1908), Beyond the Skyline (1909), The Lantern of Luck (1909), The Man in the Mirror (1910), and The White Blackbird (1912).

He is not a widely documented literary figure today, so only a few biographical details are easy to confirm. What remains clear is the shape of his career: a Glasgow-born storyteller whose fast-moving popular novels found readers in the Edwardian era and still survive through library and archive collections.