John Galt

John Galt (1779–1839) was born in Irvine, Ayrshire, and worked as a merchant and later a colonial administrator in Upper Canada, where he founded the city of Guelph, Ontario, before returning to Scotland deep in debt from the venture. He is remembered above all for The Annals of the Parish (1821), a fictional country minister's year-by-year diary of the small social and economic changes overtaking his Ayrshire parish across the late eighteenth century — an early, influential experiment in social realism sometimes credited as a founding text of the regional novel. He wrote prolifically afterward but never matched its success. He died in Greenock, Scotland, at fifty-nine.