George Douglas Brown

George Douglas Brown (1869–1902) was a Scottish novelist born in Ochiltree, Ayrshire, the illegitimate son of a farmer and an Irish farm servant. He studied at the University of Glasgow and at Balliol College, Oxford, then worked as a journalist and hack writer in London. He published his one enduring novel in 1901 under the pen name "George Douglas," conceiving it as a corrective to the sentimental kailyard school of Scottish fiction. He died of pneumonia the following year at the age of thirty-three.