Many of her important prose pieces have been collected in
Second Words (1982). The Protean Atwood has also been a dramatist, cartoonist, and illustrator. And all of these are talents which have been exercised constantly in her relatively short but productive career.
Atwood, the daughter of Carl and Margaret Killam Atwood, was born 18 November 1939 in Ottawa, the second of three children in a family with strong cultural roots in Nova Scotia. A large part of each of her early years was spent in the wilderness of northern Quebec, where her father pursued his entomological research. Settling in Toronto in 1946, her parents continued to take the children into the northern woods in summer. This childhood experience not only prepared Atwood well for her typical Canadian teenage employment at summer camps, but also provided the background for her later novel Surfacing (1972) and much of the thematic material for her "nature" verse. Aside from what she jokingly refers to as her "dark period"--between the ages of eight and sixteen, when she had ambitions to paint or design clothes--Atwood has always written, beginning her career as a poet, short story writer, cartoonist, and reviewer in her high school paper and then contributing to the Acta Victoriana and the Strand at Victoria College, University of Toronto.
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