Every August 15, Clan Scott celebrates the birthday of one of the more illustrious members, Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832). Widely recognized today at having created the historical novel as a literary genre - in his own day he was widely regarded for all forms of literature that he created: poetry, biography, criticism, and history.
An active lawyer who held important judicial positions in Scottish society it appears that there was a concern that his day job should not be overshadowed by his growing fame as a novelist and thus he wrote with a pen name as "the author of Waverley" despite wide public knowledge of the true identity of the author.
He achieved a worldwide readership at a time that this was rare, and was knighted as a baronet in 1819.
