"I was conceived in a green canoe on the Bay of Quinte and born in a taxi between Trenton and Belleville."1 An auspicious beginning for a man who would spend much of his life moving around. "I grew up pretty much an outcast. For a variety of reasons,...

Farley Mowat is considered by many to be "Canada's most famous author of nature lore," according to John Bemrose writing in Maclean's. With nearly forty published books and fourteen million copies of his works printed in thirty-five languages, Mowat's...

Farley McGill Mowat was born in Belleville, Ontario, on 12 May 1921, the son of Angus McGill and Helen E. Thomson Mowat. Educated in public schools in Ontario and Saskatchewan, he completed his B.A. at the University of Toronto in 1949 after serving...

BAY OF SPIRITS A Love Story By Farley Mowat Carroll & Graf. 360 pp. $25.95In the summer of 1957, Farley Mowat was 36 years old. He had served with distinction in Europe in World War II, then returned to his native...

Farley Mowat, Farley Mowat. The name is familiar. Something about wolves. Or boats. Or whales. Or Eskimos. Lots of ice and snow, anyway. And for a Canadian, something of a hell-raiser, right? Right. Were he setting forth to know the North today,...

Paul Watson flies the Jolly Roger from his ship and boasts of ramming more boats than any living seafarer, part of an anti-whaling crusade that even Greenpeace calls too radical.Watson and his group came under withering criticism this season, summer in the Antarctic, for tactics...

An anti-whaling group's boat and a Japanese whale-spotting vessel collided in Antarctic waters Monday during violent clashes over a pod of whales, conservationists and Japanese officials said.The anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd said a 3-foot gash was torn into the hull of its ship, the Robert...

Mowat's children's books (and all are boy's books) demonstrate his desire, on the one hand, to indoctrinate boys with his social concepts and values and, on the other, to retain the pleasant memories of his childhood. For the most part Mowat skilfully disguises his didactic intent. He hides it under narrative motifs and themes that have to do with wish-fulfillment, with the search for affection and security, with animals as a way of satisfying a child's wish to love and be loved,...

[When] a book is as dull, repetitive and simplistic as The Snow Walker too often is, one can only hope that readers will quickly learn to mistrust McClelland and Stewart's unblushing declaration that this collection of short stories "is among Farley Mowat's finest contributions to Canadian literature." This is not to say that The Snow Walker is without virtues…. The title story summarizes what might be called the thematic heart of the collection—the noble, dignified...

Farley Mowat has written twenty-four books since People of the Deer (1952)—which Hugh MacLennan called "the finest thing of its sort to come out of Canada"—and it's a rare and lonely season when no new Mowat graces the stands. This season Peter Davison has saved us with The World of Farley Mowat [a collection of Mowat's work]. Mowat's immense popularity has remained as constant and as changing as his favourite elements, snow and sea…. Adored by the mas...