Biography Essay

Walter Scott was the most influential novelist in world literature. Relying on his capacious memory and drawing on medieval and Renaissance verse romance, his eighteenth-century forerunners in the novel, contemporary women writers of "national tales" and "historical romances," his education in Scottish Enlightenment history and sociology, his strong reaction to the revolutionary crises of his day, and his experience as a best-selling narrative poet, Scott fashioned the historical novel as a major vehicle for inventing the "national" culture, history, identity, and destiny during an age of rapid and often violent change. Accordingly his novels, like his narrative poems, were not only best-sellers in their time but widely imitated then and thereafter, inspiring generations of nation builders in Europe and around the world through the nineteenth into the twentieth century.

Yet Scott came from a relatively obscure social and intellectual background and the margins of Europe. He...