Sir Walter Scott
1771–1832 · Scotland
he invented the historical novel and wrote himself to death paying for it
Polio at eighteen months left Scott lame for life and sent him to a Borders farm to recover, where he heard the ballads and feuds that fed everything he wrote. He trained as a lawyer, held salaried legal posts to the end, and treated literature as something a gentleman did on the side — which is partly why he published the novels anonymously for thirteen years, as "the Author of Waverley", admitting the authorship only in 1827.
He effectively invented the historical novel: not costume, but the idea that people in the past thought differently, and that a nation's past could be a subject. Waverley in 1814 was imitated across Europe within a decade.
He also, in 1822, stage-managed George IV's visit to Edinburgh into a pageant of tartan and clan romance, much of it recently invented, which shaped how Scotland has been pictured ever since.
Then the crash. As a secret partner in a printing and publishing business, he was left personally liable in 1826 for debts of roughly a hundred and thirty thousand pounds. He refused bankruptcy, put everything into trust, and wrote to pay it off. The work killed him in 1832. The debt was cleared after his death.