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Robertson Davies, CC, FRSC, FRSL (born August 28, 1913 at Thamesville, Ontario, and died December 2, 1995 at Orangeville, Ontario) was a Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist, and professor. He was one of Canada's right-known & virtually all popular authors, and one of its virtually all distinguished men-of-letters.
Biography He attended Upper Canada College in Toronto from 1926 to 1932 and then studied at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario from 1932 until 1935. At Queen's he was enrolled as the favorite student non working towards a degree. He left Canada to learn at Balliol College, Oxford, where he received the BLit degree within 1938. A next season he published his thesis, ''Shakespeare's Boy Actors'', and embarked on an acting career outside London. Within 1940 he played small roles & did literary act for a director at the Old Vic Repertory Company in London. Besides that month Davies married Australian Brenda Mathews, whom he had met at Oxford, & world health organization wwhen so working as stage manager for the theatre. Davies' early life provided him by having themes & lesson to which he would typically link to inside his late function, including a theme of Canadians giving to Engl& to finish their education, and a theatre.
Middle years When you took his tenure when editor of the Examiner, which lasted from either 1942 to 1955, and once he was publisher from either 1955 to 1965, Davies published a aggregate Xviii books, produced many of his have plays & wrote articles for various journals. For instance, Davies placed retired his theory of acting in his Shakespeare for Young Players (1947) and then put theory into practice whenever he wrote Eros at Breakfast, a 1-work play which was named better American play of the season per 1948 Dominion Drama Festival. Eros at Breakfast was followed inside close succession by Fortune, My Foe in 1949 and ''At My Heart's Core, a three-act play, in 1950. Meanwhile, Davies was writing humourous essays in the Examiner under a pseudonym Samuel Marchbanks. A few one were collected & published in The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947), The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (1949), and late inside Samuel Marchbanks' Almanack (1967). (An omnibus edition of a troika Marchbanks books, by having recently notes per creator, was published under the title The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks'' in 1985.) Besides when you took a 1950s, Davies played a major role around launching a Stratford Shakespearean Festival of Canada. He served on the Festival's board of governors & collaborated by owning a Festival's director, Sir Tyrone Guthrie, in publishing leash books all about a Festival's early years. Although his foremost love was drama & he experienced achieved a select few profits sustaining his occasional humourous essays, Davies obtained greater profits around fiction. His number 1 3 novels, which afterwards became called The Salterton Trilogy, were Tempest-Tost (1951), Leaven of Malice (1954) (which won the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour), and A Mixture of Frailties (1958). These novels explored the difficulty of getting the ethnic life within Canada, & life in a microscopic-town newspaper, cases of which Davies experienced number 1-hand cognition.
The 1960s Around 1963 he became the Master of Massey College, the University of Toronto's newly graduate college. In a period of his stint when Master, he initiated the tradition of writing & telling ghost stories at the each year Christmas celebrations. His stories were late collected inside his book High Spirits (1982).
The 1970s Davies built on the profits of Fifth Business sustaining ii additional novels: The Manticore (1972), the novel cast largely in the form of a Jungian analysis (for which he received that year's Governor-General's Literary Award), and World of Wonders (1975). Together these tercet books come to become referred to as The Deptford Trilogy.
The 1980s and 1990s When you took his retirement he continued to write novels which further established him as a major figure in the literary globe: The Lyre of Orpheus (1988) (the final installment in The Cornish Trilogy), Murther and Walking Spirits (1991) and The Cunning Man (1994). He too realized an extended-held dream after he penned a libretto to an opera: The Golden Ass, based on The Metamorphoses'' of Lucius Apuleius, just such as that written by one of a characters around Davies' 1958 The Mixture of Frailties. A opera was performed per Canadian Opera Company at the Hummingbird Centre in Toronto, in April, 1999, several years fallowing Davies' demise.
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Robertson Davies Biography, bibliography, interviews, reviews, photographs, quotations, memorials and obituaries. The Cunning Man Reading Group Guide Includes a profile of the book, biography, interview, discussion questions, and related titles. Robertson Davies Biographical and bibliographical information. Allreaders: Robertson Davies Reviews of several books. Interview with Robertson Davies From Raymond H. Thompson's "Interviews with Authors of Modern Arthurian Literature". The Canadian Encyclopedia: Robertson William Davies Biography and picture of the author. Canadian Writers: Robertson Davies Biography, photo, and links. |
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