Marta Dvorak. Ernest Buckler: Rediscovery and Assessment. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001. viii + 279 Pp. $34.95 cloth. There is a prevailing tendency in Canadian arts and letters to view Ernest Buckler as a one-book wonder who somehow, and for a...

Suzanne Buckler, 73, a social activist who worked on numerous issues, including human rights and affordable housing, died of lung cancer Oct. 15 at her home in Potomac. Ms. Buckler worked through her church, the Unitarian Universalist Church in Rockville, in the 1980s...

The particular interest of Buckler's early sketches and stories is in following themes and characters which would appear in more serious and mature form in the later fiction. In this sense, all his early work was a dress rehearsal for The Mountain and the Valley. Buckler's first published story was "One Quiet Afternoon," which appeared in the April, 1940 issue of Esquire magazine. Here one senses Buckler struggling to find an appropriate form for his materials. The story lacks a ...

Ernest Buckler's The Mountain and the Valley (1952) is a fine example of the pastoral impulse, and its meaning is greatly illuminated when viewed within the framework of the pastoral tradition. When the novel is considered in these terms, one is able to perceive the profound manner in which Buckler transforms his geographically-, chronologically- and morally-defined pastoral world into a spiritual landscape itself symbolic of the mind of his semi-autobiographical protagonist, David Canaan…. Li...

[In the severe isolation of David Canaan in The Mountain and the Valley, one encounters an] attempt to discover new ground upon which the withdrawn self might stand in its efforts to move into presence. During his childhood and youth David's vivid impulses fascinate his family and friends…. Throughout childhood and early youth David moves among others with the aura about him of the chosen person, the mysterious Nazarite who is motioned toward an unknowable destiny by unseen gods. But what is a...