Horatio Gilbert George Parker was born on 23 November 1860 in the small lumbering town of Camden East (Canada West, now Ontario) to Joseph and Samantha Jane Simmons Parker, both of English, Loyalist descent. As a young man he cast his net into a variety of streams before settling on writing as a career, and he tried several kinds of writing before concentrating on fiction. Initially he trained and worked as a teacher. At the age of twenty-one he was drawn to the church, and after qualifying for the deaconate in the Church of England he entered Trinity College, Toronto, to study for the ministry. At the same time, he was hired by Trinity as professor of elocution. After several terms as a divinity student, he became a professor of elocution at Queen's University, Kingston, keeping up his religious activities and also giving well-attended public readings. In 1885 he again changed course, withdrawing from the church and publishing his first poems in periodicals. To recover from the stress of illness, overwork, and the death of a brother, early in 1886 Parker embarked on a voyage to the South Seas, acquiring a wide range of experiences that were to reappear in his fiction.
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