As For Sinclair Ross

As For Me and My House is an essential Canadian work--a precise and compelling portrait of our culture, our psyche, and the nature of contemporary art itself, now available as a Penguin Modern Classic. In the windswept town of Horizon, an unamed diarist paints a vivid and enthralling picture of prairie life in the Depression era. Atmospheric, intimate, and richly observed, As For Me and My House is a moving meditation on the bittersweet nature of human relationships, on the bonds that tie people together and the undercurrents of feeling that can tear them apart. It is one of Canada's great novels and a landmark in modern fiction.

In the past twenty years, as the structures of Canadian culture have begun to change, so has the fate of As For Me and My House.

We catch glimpses of him living beside the Mediterranean in Greece and in Spain where his career as a novelist later revived and where Fraser first visited him in the 1970s.

On the eve of his retirement, Doctor "Sawbones" Hunter reflects on his career as a small-town physician. Introduction by Ken Mitchell.

Heralded as a prairie writer and best known for As For Me and My House and for his stories of the bleak dust bowl Prairies of the Great Depression, Sinclair Ross has also written of urban life and, briefly, of army life, as the stories in this collection demonstrate. The Race and Other Stories includes previously uncollected short stories and a chapter from Whir of Gold, here title "The Race," which stands on its own as a short story. Furthermore, "Spike," published in French in Liberté in 1969, appears here for the first time in English. Ross's taut, economical, rhythmic prose reflects the bleak, spare landscape of the prairie. The concerns of his novels are equally evident in his stories: loneliness and alienation, the sense of entrapment, the imaginative and artistic struggle. This collection of stories will be of interest to those who wish to better understand one of Canada's most respected writers and the diversity that can be found in his writings.

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 story of a lonely childhood in rural Saskatchewan, of a long and unrewarding career in a bank, and of many failed attempts to be published and to find an audience. The book also tells the story of a man who fell in love with both men and women and who wrote from a position outside any single definition of gender and sexuality. Stouck's biography draws on archival records and on insights gathered during an acquaintance late in Ross's life to illuminate this difficult author, describing in detail the struggles of a gifted artist living in an inhospitable time and place. Stouck argues that when Ross was writing about prairie farmers and small towns, he wanted his readers to see the kind of society they were creating, to feel uncomfortable with religion as coercive rhetoric, prejudices based on race and ethnicity, and rigid notions of gender. As for Sinclair Ross is the story of a remarkable writer whose works continue to challenge us and are rightly considered classics of Canadian literature.

Sinclair Ross’ 1941 novel As For Me and My House is a masterpiece of Canadian literature, a stunning evocation of the Prairies and their inhabitants during the Depression of the Thirties. With The Lamp at Noon and Other Stories, an original New Canadian Library collection, Ross reveals further dimensions of his fictional universe. A woman’s impulsive infidelity leads to tragedy. A sudden hailstorm destroys hope. A boy learns to conquer a beautiful wild horse. A little girl dreams about a circus. Against the isolated, haunting landscapes of summer droughts and winter blizzards, the men and women of Ross’ stories grapple with fate against almost impossible odds. Marked by a legacy of pride that will not suffer defeat, Ross’ unyielding characters are cut off from their loved ones by obstinacy and defiance. Their tragedy is not that they suffer, but that they suffer alone. The sensitivity, compassion, and subtlety with which Ross portrays human aspirations and failings remain to this day unequalled in Canadian fiction.

Sonny, an aspiring musician, and Mad, a young woman down on her luck, struggle to survive in the mean streets of Montreal. Introduction by Nat Hardy.