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Biography

 

            Robertson Davies, writer, deskman and professor. He was born in the small village of Thamesville, Ontario on August 28, 1913 and died on December 2, 1995, at the age of 82. . Robertson was an outstanding essayist and great novelist. The third son of Senator William Rupert Davies, Robertson Davies participated in drama productions as a child and developed a lifelong interest in drama. He attended Upper Canada Coll during 1926-1932 and went on to Queen's University duing 1932-1935 as a special student, who was not studying for a degree. At Balliol Coll, Oxford, England, he received the "BLit" in 1938. His document, "Shakespeare's Boy Actors," came out in 1939, a year which he was being an acting career outside London. During 1940,He was playing unimportant roles and writting books for the director at the Old Vic Repertory Company in London. That year he married Brenda Mathews, a woman he had met at Oxford, who was then working as stage manager for the stages.
             Robertson returned to Canada in 1940 as book editor of Saturday Night. Two years later, he became editor of the Peterborough Examiner, a position that afforded him unlimited material for many characters and plots, which appeared in his novels and plays. While editing this paper during 1940-1955, and when he was bookmaker during 1955-1965, Robertson wrote 18 books, produced several of his own plays and wrote lots of articles for different newspapers. Robertson moved from the though of acting outlined in Shakespeare for Young Players (1947) to the writing of plays with Eros at Breakfast, a one-act play which won the 1948 Dominion Drama Festival Award for best Canadian play. Eros at Breakfast and Other Plays and award-winning Fortune, My Foe were made in 1949; At My Heart's Core, a 3-act play based on the Strickland sisters, appeared in 1950. Later, he tidy up some of his funny essays (under the name Samuel Marchbanks) from the Examiner in The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947), The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (1949) and Samuel Marchbanks' Almanack (1967).


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