William Black (1841-1898) was a novelist born in Glasgow. He was educated with a view to being a landscape painter, a training that clearly influenced his literary life, and as a writer he became celebrated for the detailed and atmospheric descriptions of landscapes and seascapes in novels such as White Wings: A Yachting Romance (1880). At the age of twenty-three he went to London, after some experience in Glasgow journalism, and joined the staff of The Morning Star, and, later, the Daily News, of which journal he became assistant-editor. He wrote a weekly serial in The Graphic. In the Austro- Prussian War he acted as a war correspondent. His first novel, James Merle appeared in 1864, and met with little success.
