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William Ormond Mitchell was born in 1914 in Weyburn, Saskatchewan. While, like many of his most memorable characters, he did grow up on the Canadian prairies, he also spent four of his teenage years going to school in California and Florida in order to recover from a childhood case of tuberculosis. Returning to Canada in 1931, Mitchell studied philosophy and psychology at the University of Manitoba for three years. After his studies were interrupted by a recurrence of his childhood illness, Mitchell wnet on to work in a variety of jobs, first in Seattle and later in Calgary. It was also at this time that he began to take his writing very seriously.
In 1940, W.O. Mitchell enrolled at the University of Alberta where he continued his undergraduate studies, receiving a BA and teaching certificate in 1943. It was also in Edmonton that he met and married his wife, Merna Hirtle, with whom he eventually had three children. Mitchell's undergraduate years at the University also brought him into contact with another person who would be a great influence in his life, Professor F.M. Salter. Salter, a creative writing instructor at the University, helped Mitchell hone his craft and later, in 1942, arranged for the publication of three of Mitchell's short stories.
Mitchell continued to write as he taught high school in anumber of small Alberta towns and in 1947 his first novel was published by Macmillan of Canada. Who Has Seen the Wind was published to immediate critical acclaim and popular success and remains Mitchell's most popular novel. With the success of Who Has Seen the Wind, Mitchell was able to devote himsel full-time to his writing. That success also led him to leave the prairies for a short time as he moved to Toronto to become the fiction editor for Macean's magazine, a job he held from 1948-51. It was after arriving in Toronto that Mitchell created Jake and the Kid, a weekly radio series for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that lasted from 1949 to 1957 and yielded an incredible 320 episodes. If Mitchell's popularity in Canada was not fully established with Who Has Seen The Wind, it was most certainly cemented with Jake and the Kid.
In 1951 Mitchell returned to the town of High River, Alberta and there he continued his work on the radio series and produced many other memorable works, including the radio play The Black Bonspiel of Wullie MacCrimmon (1951), a collection of Jake and the Kid (1961) stories which had initially been adapted for the radio series, and the novels The Alien (1953) and The Kite (1962).
Between 1968 and 1987 W.O. Mitchell served as a professor of creative writing and a writer in residence at a number of different Canadian universities, including the University of Calgary (1968-71) and the University of Windsor (1979-87). From 1975 to 1985, he also served as the director of the Banff Centre's writing division. Despite all his commitments to mentoring other writers during this twenty-year period between 1968 and 1988 saw Mitchell publish four novels: The Vanishing Point (1973), How I Spent My Summer Holidays, Since Daisy Creek, and a suspense novel Ladybug, Ladybug. He also continued to write for the stage. In the 1970's he reworked two earlier radio dramas, The Devil's Instrument and The Black Bonspiel of Wullie MacCrimmon, as full-length plays. In 1982, he also wrote a dramatic version of his novel The Kite. Two works written especially for thestage, Back to Beulah (1976) and For Those in Peril on the Sea (1982), were also very successful, the former winning the prestigious Chalmers Award in 1976. In 1982, these five plays were collected in the volume Dramatic W.O. Mitchell.
The late 1980s and early 1990s saw several other new works by W.O. Mitchell. In 1989 he won the Stephen Leacock Award for According to Jake and the Kid and followed that collection with Roses are Difficult Here (1990) and the mystery For Art's Sake (1992). Illustrated editions of Who Has Seen The Wind and The Black Bonspiel of Wullie MacCrimmon were published in 1991 and 1993 respectively. W.O. Mitchell's most recent work is An Evening with W.O. Mitchell (1997), a collection of Mitchell's most popular performance. This October also marks the publication of the 50th anniversary edition of Who Has Seen The Wind. What is exciting about this particular edition is that it returns to the orginal version of the novel before it had 7000 words edited out of it by the publishers of the first American edition. The shortened American edition went on to become the basis for all subsequent editions of the text, with the exception of the deluxe illustrated edition published in 1991.
For fifty years, W.O. Mitchell has been one of Canada's most popular and influential writers. The list of honours he has received includes honourary doctorates from five Canadian universities, an appointment as an Officer of the Order of Canada, and being named an Honourary Member of the Privy Council in 1992.
| An Evening with W.O. Mitchell - BTC Audio Books |
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