Social Realism, Sexual Comedy, Science Fiction, Satire, the subtitle to the American edition of Alasdair Gray's Ten Tales Tall and True (1993), could easily stand as a capsule description of the range of the author's work. He is best known as an experimental novelist and illustrator and as one of the leading literary figures of Scotland at the turn of the twenty-first century. Anthony Burgess once acclaimed him the best Scottish novelist since Sir Walter Scott. Gray has also gained some small measure of renown in the worlds of English-language science fiction and fantasy for his best-known novel, Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981), which conjoins the conventions of those genres with those of the contemporary realistic novel.

Alasdair James Gray was born in the Riddrie neighborhood of Glasgow on 28 December 1934. His parents were Alexander Gray, a factory worker who made cardboard boxes, and Amy Fleming Gray. Gray's working-class...