John Galt studied at schools of Irvine and Greenock in 1788.
Settling in London in 1804, Galt began a strenuous business and literary career, which was unsuccessful until he published in Blackwood's Magazine (1820-1821) The Ayrshire Legatees, a delightful epistolary novel in which a rural pastor and his family describe London adventures in letters to friends at home. Annals of the Parish (1821) received even wider acclaim; in this novel the Rev. Micah Balwhidder, perhaps Galt's finest character, records the social, political, religious, and economic changes that took place in his parish from 1760 to 1810. These two works and later novels in the same genre, Sir Andrew Wylie (1822), The Provost (1822), The Entail (1823), regarded as his finest novel, and The Last of the Lairds (1826), firmly establish Galt's place in literary history as a novelist of western Scottish village life, comparable in stature to Burns as a poet. Galt worked with the Canada Company from 1826 to 1829; this experience is reflected in Lawrie Todd (1830), an admirable sketch of life during the early years of colonization in the woods of Upper Canada.