Sinclair Ross (1908-1996), best known for his canonical novel As for Me and My House (1941), and for such familiar short stories as "The Lamp at Noon" and "The Painted Door," is an elusive figure in Canadian literature. A master at portraying the hardships and harsh beauty of the Prairies during the Great Depression, Ross nevertheless received only modest attention from the public during his lifetime. His reluctance to give readings or interviews further contributed to this faint public perception of the man.

In As for Sinclair Ross, David Stouck tells the...

Sinclair Ross's novel As For Me and My House was by all publishing standards a failure for the first thirty years of its life. Now, exactly a half-century after it first appeared in 1941, it has become a Canadian classic, the subject of more critical discussion and debate than any other single work of Canadian fiction. David Stouck has brought together some of the most important contributions of the vast body of critical writing on Ross's novel. The collection charts the fortunes of one work of fiction and in the process sheds much light on the development of English-Canadian literature as...

When Ethel Wilson published her first novel, Hetty Dorval, she was in her sixtieth year. With her subsequent books, among them the widely read Swamp Angel (1954), she established herself as one of Canada's most important writers. Although she fostered a reputation for being an unambitious latecomer, a happily married doctor's wife who wrote for her own pleasure, she in fact took her writing very seriously, trying for several years to place her work with major American publishers.

David Stouck's engaging biography of this elusive Canadian writer draws on archival...