John Galt was a Scottish novelist, entrepreneur, and political and social commentator.

Sharon Alker is the Mary A. Denny Professor of English at Whitman College, USA. Most recently she has cowritten, with Holly Faith Nelson, an article on "Defoe and War" for the Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe and co-published a monograph, Besieged: Early Modern British Siege Literature, 1642-1722 (McGill-Queens University Press, 2021). She is also widely published in the field of Scottish literature, including articles and book chapters on Mary Brunton, John Galt, James Hogg, and Tobias Smollett. She co-edited several books, including James Hogg and the Literary Marketplace (Ashgate, 2009) with Holly Faith Nelson and Robert Burns and Transatlantic Culture (Ashgate 2012) with Leith Davis and Holly Faith Nelson.