Robertson Davies (1913-1995) enjoyed a distinguished career as a journalist, playwright, and novelist, helping to enhance the literary standing of his native Canada. Robertson Davies was a writer of grand ideas and fertile imagination who excelled in a...

As a rule, I never tape-record interviews. But when I went to Toronto in 1988 to profile one of my favorite writers, Robertson Davies, I decided to make an exception, for fear of butchering a particularly sage aphorism or esoteric reference. The device...

ROBERTSON DAVIES Man of Myth By Judith Skelton Grant Viking. 787 pp. $35 THE TERRITORY of wonder that Robertson Davies means to reclaim in his marvelous novels dates to the Middle Ages and an outlook long since discarded by civilized folk: "It was...

[Gussow is an American journalist, nonfiction writer, and critic. In the following essay, which was based on an interview with Davies, Gussow discusses Davies's career and most recent novel, The Cunning Man.]

That there is a market in these days of tight publishing budgets for a bibliography of works by and on Robertson Davies, a study of his plays, and a collection of his "Pronouncements" is an index of Davies' current popularity. This popularity is based on his second trilogy—Fifth Business, The Manticore, and World of Wonders—for in these books Davies has created vivid and distinctive central characters whose eccentric interests have both popular appeal and a philosophic und...

In the main, the heroes and heroines of Robertson Davies' novels, the characters through whom he chooses to tell his stories, are scholars. They are also pedants. They have many opinions, whereas scholars in the strict sense have only a few, closely related to their disciplines. In the course of their conversations and meditations. Davies' heroes and heroines express their opinions expansively and with wide-ranging references to history and literature. Furthermore, since the habit of forming o...