author
John Moore
1729–1802
A Scottish physician who turned his sharp eye for people and places into bestselling travel books and novels, he wrote with the curiosity of a doctor and the timing of a storyteller. His most famous novel, Zeluco, helped make him a widely read literary name in late eighteenth-century Britain.
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About the author
Born in Stirling in 1729, John Moore trained in medicine at Glasgow and began his career as a surgeon and physician. Over time he moved from medical work into writing, drawing on years of travel and close observation of society.
Moore became well known for his lively books on continental Europe, including A View of Society and Manners in France, Switzerland, and Germany and A View of Society and Manners in Italy. He also published Medical Sketches and the novel Zeluco (1789), which remained his best-known work. His writing is often noted for combining practical intelligence with social insight.
He died in London in 1802. Though less famous now than in his own lifetime, Moore was an important figure in late eighteenth-century literary culture, and he is also remembered as the father of General Sir John Moore.