Walter Scott (1771-1832) was born in Edinburgh, the ninth child of a Writer to the Signet (ie Edinburgh solicitor). Walter was also destined for a modest career in law. He was temperamentally inclined to the army - but a disabling attack of infantile paralysis in early childhood killed his hopes. Scott gave early evidence of his literary-antiquarian talent. His ballad collecting resulted in The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-3). There followed a brilliant career in best-selling narrative verse. With Byron's eruption on the scene in 1812 Scott apprehended that he was, as he said, 'beat'. He turned to fiction anonymously with Waverley (1814), the most influential novel of the century. Among the 'Scottish' novels that followed were Old Mortality (1816), a story of the Coventanting Revolution, and Scott's study of Scottish, female, working-class heroism, The Heart of Midlothian (1818). With Ivanhoe (1819) he turned his attention to English history. Scott ran into catastrophic bankruptcy in 1826, and the years before his premature death in 1832 were a desperate struggle with debts and creditors. Scott's tales are swaggering stories of love, bravery and intrigue, set in the highlands and islands of Scotland.
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