James Hogg

James Hogg (1770–1835), the self-taught Scottish poet known as the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’, wrote The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), a startling, ambiguous tale of a young man led to murder by a shape-shifting stranger who may be the Devil or a projection of his own mind. A foundational work of the psychological uncanny and the doppelgänger tradition, far ahead of its time.