George Douglas Brown, a Scottish novelist, is best known for his hugely important realism novel The House with the Green Shutters (1901), which was published the year before his death at 33. Brown was the illegitimate son of a farmer and an Irish woman. He attended school in Ochiltree, Coylton, and Ayr, and his academic prowess qualified him to study Classics at the University of Glasgow and Balliol College, Oxford. However, his studies were delayed by his mother's illness; he went to Ayrshire to nurse her, but she died, and he barely passed his final exams in 1895. The novel paints a vivid image of the harsher and less pleasant parts of Scottish life and character, and it was viewed as a helpful counterpoint to the rosier depictions of the kailyard school of J. M. Barrie and Ian Maclaren. It was reprinted several times throughout the twentieth century, most recently by Birlinn of Edinburgh. The Green Shutters Festival of Working Class Writing, an annual event in Brown's memory, takes place in Ochiltree, the town said to be the model for Barbie's hamlet.
