Scottish poet, novelist, short story and song writer, journalist, editor, playwright, and essayist.

A nearly illiterate shepherd until the age of eighteen, Hogg became a prolific writer of poetry, ballads, songs, short stories, and historical narratives who was ranked among Scottish writers only below Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott. He established a persona as the "Ettrick Shepherd," a rustic and provincial poet, and gained fame through his association with the influential Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Yet that reputation declined after his death, and a century later he was remembered, if at all, only for an unconventional novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), which during his life had been dismissed as an obtuse satire on Christian fanaticism. Featuring Gothic and supernatural elements, including a schizophrenic narrator and a psychological double/devil figure, as well as proto-modern narrative complexity, the...