21 Facts About Robertson Davies

William Robertson Davies was a Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist, and professor.

Robertson Davies was one of Canada's best known and most popular authors and one of its most distinguished "men of letters", a term Davies gladly accepted for himself.

Robertson Davies was born in Thamesville, Ontario, the third son of William Rupert Robertson Davies and Florence Sheppard McKay.

Robertson Davies's father, a member of the Canadian Senate from 1942 to his death in 1967, was a newspaperman from Welshpool, Wales, and both parents were voracious readers.

Robertson Davies followed in their footsteps and read everything he could.

Robertson Davies participated in theatrical productions as a child, where he developed a lifelong interest in drama.

Robertson Davies spent his formative years in Renfrew, Ontario ; many of the novel's characters are named after families he knew there.

Robertson Davies attended Upper Canada College in Toronto from 1926 to 1932 and while there attended services at the Church of St Mary Magdalene.

Robertson Davies later used his experience of the ceremonial of High Mass at St Mary Magdalene's in his novel The Cunning Man.

Robertson Davies left Canada to study at Balliol College, Oxford, where he received a BLitt degree in 1938.

Also that year, Robertson Davies married Australian Brenda Mathews, whom he had met at Oxford, and who was then working as stage manager for the theatre.

Robertson Davies set out his theory of acting in his Shakespeare for Young Players, and then put theory into practice when he wrote Eros at Breakfast, a one-act play which was named best Canadian play of the year by the 1948 Dominion Drama Festival.

Robertson Davies served on the Festival's board of governors, and collaborated with the Festival's director, Sir Tyrone Guthrie, in publishing three books about the Festival's early years.

In 1960, Robertson Davies joined Trinity College at the University of Toronto, where he would teach literature until 1981.

Robertson Davies drew on his interest in Jungian psychology to create Fifth Business, a novel that relies heavily on Robertson Davies's own experiences, his love of myth and magic, and his knowledge of small-town mores.

The narrator, like Robertson Davies, is of immigrant Canadian background, with a father who runs the town paper.

Robertson Davies built on the success of Fifth Business with two more novels: The Manticore, a novel cast largely in the form of a Jungian analysis, and World of Wonders.

When Robertson Davies retired from his position at the university, his seventh novel, a satire of academic life, The Rebel Angels, was published, followed by What's Bred in the Bone which was short-listed for the Booker Prize for fiction in 1986.

Robertson Davies realized a long-held dream when he penned the libretto to Randolph Peters' opera: The Golden Ass, based on The Metamorphoses of Lucius Apuleius, just like that written by one of the characters in Davies's 1958 A Mixture of Frailties.

Robertson Davies's novels combined deep seriousness and psychological inquiry with fantasy and exuberant mirth.

Robertson Davies wrote in support of Salman Rushdie when the latter was threatened by a fatwa from Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran in reaction to supposed anti-Islam expression in his novel The Satanic Verses.