Biography

Robertson Davies, writer, deskman and professor. He was born in the small village of Thamesville, Ontario on August 28, 1913 and died on December 2, 1995, at the age of 82. . Robertson was an outstanding essayist and great novelist. The third son of Senator William Rupert Davies, Robertson Davies participated in drama productions as a child and developed a lifelong interest in drama. He attended Upper Canada Coll during 1926-1932 and went on to Queen's University duing 1932-1935 as a special student, who was not studying for a degree. At Balliol Coll, Oxford, England, he received the "BLit" in 1938. His document, "Shakespeare's Boy Actors," came out in 1939, a year which he was being an acting career outside London. During 1940,He was playing unimportant roles and writting books for the director at the Old Vic Repertory Company in London. That year he married Brenda Mathews, a woman he had met at Oxford, who was then working as stage manager for the stages.
Robertson returned to Canada in 1940 as book editor of Saturday Night. Two years later, he became editor of the Peterborough Examiner, a position that afforded him unlimited material for many characters and plots, which appeared in his novels and plays. While editing this paper d

In 1960, Robertson joined The Trinity College at University of Toronto, where he taught literature courses until 1981. The next year, 1961, he wrote a collection of essays on literature, A Voice from the Attic, and was got the Lorne Pierce Medal for his literary results. In 1963 he became master of Massey College, the university's new college. By 1967 he was made an RSC fellow, and soon began receiving honorary degrees from many Canadian universities. Some of his best essays and talks appeared later in One Half of Robertson Davies, The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies and The Well-Tempered Critic. In them, Robertson found his many difficult interests with characteristic novels. Robertson found his good are neither in drama nor in funny essays, but in fiction. His first 3 novels, later known as the Salterton trilogy, were Tempest-Tost (1951), Leaven of Malice (1954) ,which won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, and A Mixture of Frailties (1958). These novels tell the difficulty of having a cultural life in Canada. During the 1950s, he played a major role in telling the Stratford Festival, serving on the board of governors and publishing with director Sir Tyrone Guthrie three books about the Festival's early years (1953-55). He al