After the publication of Docherty in 1975, William McIlvanney was hailed as the most important novelist of his generation in Scotland. Docherty was recognized not only as a fine novel (a review in the Scotsman suggested it was the best Scottish novel since MacDougall Hay's Gillespie of 1914) but also as a novel particularly relevant to the state of Scottish culture in the mid-1970s.

McIlvanney, born 25 November 1936, is the son of William Angus (a miner) and Helen Montgomery McIlvanney. He grew up in Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, in West Central Scotland, an area notorious as an industrial wasteland that had never recovered from the depression of the 1930s and that had witnessed the continual decline over forty years of the industries--mining, shipbuilding, engineering--on which its late nineteenth-century prosperity had been built. The area's ethos is working-class, founded in community traditions made necessary by the harshness of the environment, but the region...