James Hogg was born on a small farm near Ettrick, Selkirkshire, Scotland in 1770 and was baptised there on 9 December, his actual date of birth having never been recorded.

[5] Robert and David later emigrated to the United States, while James and William remained in Scotland for their entire lives.

[5] James attended a parish school for a few months before his education was stopped due to his father's bankruptcy as a stock-farmer and sheep-dealer.

He became a lifelong friend of his master's son, William Laidlaw, himself a minor writer and later the amanuensis of Walter Scott.

[8] Hogg first became familiar with the work of the recently deceased Robert Burns in 1797, after having the poem Tam o' Shanter read to him.

[11] He eventually found a farm on Harris but due to trouble with his finances and a legal issue he was unable to secure a lease by 1804.

In October 1806 he became the lover of a young woman named Catherine Henderson, and in the same autumn he attempted unsuccessfully to establish himself as an independent farmer.

At the end of 1813 Hogg began writing a narrative poem Mador of the Moor set in the central Highlands; he completed it the spring of 1814 but it was not published for another two years.

The second volume of Jacobite Relics was published in February 1821, and his son James Robert Hogg was born in March 1821.

Soon Blackwood's Tory views and reviews – often scurrilous attacks on other writers – were notorious, and the magazine, or "Maga" as it came to be known, had become one of the best-selling journals of its day.

As other writers such as Walter Maginn and Thomas de Quincey joined, he became not merely excluded from the lion's share of publication in Maga, but a figure of fun in its pages.

[25] In 1822 the Maga launched the Noctes Ambrosianae or "Nights at Ambrose's", imaginary conversations in a drinking-den between semi-fictional characters such as North, O'Doherty, The Opium Eater and the Ettrick Shepherd.

[25] In 1825 Hogg's daughter Maggie was born, and he began writing a new prose work, later titled Tales of the Wars of Montrose.

[26] In 1830 he started publishing in the new Fraser's Magazine, which helped to alleviate a further financial crisis,[27] and at the end of the year he met with Walter Scott for the last time.

Hogg was offered a large sum to edit a collection of the works of Robert Burns, but the bankruptcy of his London publisher stopped the publication of his Altrive Tales after the first of the twelve projected volumes.

James Hogg died on 21 November 1835 and was buried in Ettrick Churchyard, close to his childhood home in the Scottish Borders.

[29] In 2021, it was reported that his grave had been preemptively toppled by Scottish Borders Council out of safety concerns and that independent restoration efforts were planned by the community.

This eulogy notwithstanding, Wordsworth's notes state "He was undoubtedly a man of original genius, but of coarse manners and low and offensive opinions.

Victorian readers of these emasculated texts naturally came to the conclusion that Hogg had been overrated, and that he was notable mainly as an example of triumph over adverse circumstances.

[34][35][36] Apart from Justified Sinner, which even his detractors acknowledged as unusually powerful (and often attributed to someone else, usually Lockhart), his novels were regarded as turgid, his verse as light, his short tales and articles as ephemera.

This situation only began to change in 1924, when the French writer André Gide was loaned Justified Sinner by Raymond Mortimer.

"[37] Its republication in 1947, with an enthusiastic introduction by Gide,[38] helped bring about the modern critical and academic appreciation of this novel.

Now his novel The Three Perils of Woman is also considered a classic and all his work, including his letters, is undergoing major publication in the Stirling/South Carolina editions.

In a 2006 interview with Melvyn Bragg for ITV1, Scottish novelist Irvine Welsh cited Hogg, especially The Confessions as a major influence on his writing.

[39] Hogg's story "The Brownie of the Black Haggs" was dramatised for BBC Radio 4 in 2003 by Scottish playwright Marty Ross as part of his "Darker Side of the Border" series.

[citation needed] A bill he issued to purchase £50 worth of lambs in 1824 is exhibited in the Museum on the Mound, Edinburgh.