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Sir Walter Scott

WALTER SCOTT was born in Edinburgh on August 15, 1771. His father was a lawyer, the first of the Scott line to leave the open country for the town. For a man who wrote such a prodigious amount, Scott was surprisingly late in getting started. He was thirty-four years old when his first original work appeared, "The Lay of the Last Minstrel." From that moment until his death, on September 21, 1832, he was, with the possible exception of Byron, the most popular writer in English.

When the public seemed to be tiring of his long romances in verse, he turned to novel-writing, and in 1814, when he was forty-three, he came into his career of greatness with "Waverley." For eighteen years novel after novel followed in rapid succession, stirring romances of history or colorful tales of Scottish life. They were all published anonymously until the financial disaster of 1825 made it seem wise to reveal the author's name. Fully a dozen of the Waverley Novels, if not more, might be included in any list of one hundred novels, and many loyal lovers of Scott would even then think that one or two more might be added. He was, as Stevenson remarked, "the king of the romantics." "Waverley," "Ivanhoe," "The Heart of Midlothian," and "Kenilworth" are representative of Scott at his best. But "Old Mortality," "Quentin Durward," "The Talisman," "Guy Mannering," "The Fortunes of Nigel," "The Antiquary," "St. Ronan's Well," "Rob Roy," and, indeed, others have all been ranked as favorites among the innumerable admirers of the romances written by "the Wizard of the North."