In Letter to the Past, the first part of his autobiography, George Woodcock dealt with his youth and adolescence in Britain through World War One and Two and through the Depression. Now this great Canadian man of letters turns his attention to his return to Canada, and deals with the period between 1949 and 1977.
Beyond the Blue Mountains details Woodcock's life in the British Columbia bush, his close and longstanding relationship with the Doukhobors, his battles with US immigration officials. We learn of the founding of the influential Canadian Literature review, and we follow Mr. Woodcock on his extended and beautifully-described tours of India and the South Seas.
George Woodcock is not only a revered literary critic. He is also a gifted and witty raconteur. Beyond the Blue Mountains allows us further insights into the life of this fascinating man.
Winner of the Governor General's Award, the author now lives in Vancouver, where he founded and edited for many years Canadian Literature. He has written countless articles and books, including critical studies of novelists Hugh MacLennan and Mordecai Richler as well as biographies of George Orwell, Thomas Merton and Oscar Wilde. He is also responsible for the panoramic study of Canada entitled The Canadians. Mr. Woodcock has recently returned from a trip to China.
Here is what the critics have said of Letter to the Past:
"It is not so much that chronicling the lives of William Godwin, Kropotkin, and Proudhon has constituted for Woodcock a profession like that of a portraitist; more that the underlying emotional attributes of anarchism
- a profound distrust of all authority mixed with a liberal dash of utopianism - have been the informing principles in his
life." - Saturday Night
"The graceful prose is so rich in detail that its effect is almost that of a life invented, not remembered." - Macleans