John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir was born in Perth, Scotland in 1875, the son of the Reverend John Buchan, a Presbyterian clergyman, and his wife Helen Masterton, the daughter of a sheep farmer. He read classics at the universities of Glasgow and Oxord before embarking on a career spanning the London bar, the Fleet Street press, the northern and southern hemispheres of the British Empire, the Houses of Parliament, and the long wooden shelves of literature. Best known today for his adventure stories, and in particular The Thirty-Nine Steps, which Alfred Hitchcock brought to the cinema in 1935, he was a stakhanovite of English letters, penning dozens of novels and historical works in all. He died in Montreal in 1940.