by Beth Daniels

Created on: May 26, 2007

By the time of Robertson Davies death at the age of 82 on December 02, 1995 he had already long been hailed as one of Canada's most distinguished and prolific men of letters. An essayist, playwright, and novelist, Davies was generally acknowledged as a man of fierce intellect with a great sense of satirical humor.

Born in Thamesville, Ontario in 1913, Davies was raised in an upper middle class family and educated at Upper Canada College and Queens, ultimately receiving his degree in literature from Balliol Collge, Oxford in 1938.

In 1939 and part of 1940, Davies remained in England to pursue his love of acting and the theater. Before returning to Canada in late 1940 to become literary editor of Saturday Night, he married Brenda Matthews, a woman he had met while at Oxford.

After two years at Saturday Night Davies was approached by the Peterborough Examiner to become editor and since the newspaper business was part of his family's heritage it was a natural fir for Davies. In fact, he remained at the paper for nearly twenty years, first as Editor and then as its Publisher.

Never one to rest on his laurels, Davies wrote volumes while also working at the paper: in those two decades alone he published eighteen books, wrote articles for a variety of journals, and produced several of his own plays. One of his one act plays, Eros at Breakfast won the 1948 Dominion Drama Festival award for best Canadian Play.

In 1960 Robertson Davies professional life took yet another turn. He became a professor of literature at Trinity College at the University of Toronto and within two years accepted the newly created post of Master of Massey College, a new graduate college within the University system. He remained at Massey until his retirement in 1981. In typical Davies fashion, however, he was always writing while undertaking his teaching duties, as well.

Although Davies was consistently recognized for his essays and plays, it was his fiction that confirmed his brilliance as a writer. It was in fiction that he explored his true intellectual passions: the magical and the mystical, and Jungian archetypes, while also employing his characteristically biting satirical style.

In addition to individual novels, Davies wrote three well received trilogies: the Salterton Trilogy in the 1950's; the Deptford Trilogy in the 1970's; and the Cornish Trilogy in the 1980's. The Deptford Trilogy, which was comprised of the novels The Fifth Business (1970); The Manticore (1972) and World of Wonders (1975) is generally considered to represent some of his very best work. Set in semi-rural Ontario, the Deptford Trilogy explores the lives of three boys connected by a single event of their childhood. The second novel in the trilogy, The Manticore, earned Davies the prestigious Governor-General's award in 1972.

After he retired from teaching in 1981, Robertson Davies continued to lecture and write until his death in 1995. In a tribute to Davies, Penguin Books, his paperback publisher,ran a photo of the author with this quotation from the final paragraph of his last completed novel: The Cunning Man. It is pure Robertson Davies:

"... this is the Great Theater of Life. Admission
is free, but the taxation is mortal. You come when
can, and leave when you must. The show is continous.
Good Night. "

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