ABSTRACT
This chapter presents concise biographical information of Alasdair Gray and analysis of his major works and themes. There has been a renaissance in Scottish fiction in the last twenty years and its universally acknowledged founding father is Gray. In 1981 he published what the writer and critic Magnus Linklater has described as 'the landmark post-war Scottish novel', which fused 'science fiction, quasi-autobiography and an apocalyptic vision into one of the wittiest, darkest, most readable books of the last fifty years'. Gray was born in Glasgow in 1934 and attended Glasgow Art School in the mid–1950s. Before he gained fame as the author of Lanark, Gray had worked as a painter, art teacher and set designer for the theatre. Throughout his career he has been an adept, often inspired writer of short fiction, from the motley narratives collected in Unlikely Stories, Mostly to his most published stories, The Ends of Our Tethers.
