In 1975, on the publication of Docherty, William McIlvanney was hailed as the most important novelist of his generation in Scotland. Docherty was acclaimed not only for its literary qualities—a review in The Scotsman suggested that it was the best Scottish novel since MacDougall Hay's Gillespie in 1914—but also for focusing on key issues in Scottish culture in the 1970s. This was a period of renascent socialism, as indicated by events such as the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders Occupation in 1971, when workers took over one of the last of Scotland's traditional heavy industries, and the 1974 miners' strike—a socialism that was celebrated by McIlvanney 's presentation of the values of a traditional working-class community. It was also a period of a renascent Scottish identity, following the first successes of the Scottish National Party in the late 1960s and the discovery of oil in the North Sea that transformed the...