The life and work of George Edward Theodore Roberts--"Thede" to his friends--are striking on several counts. Driven by a peripatetic quest for adventure, Roberts's life was also strongly shaped by cycles of return to his roots in New Brunswick. His poetry and fiction, staggering in sheer quantity and variety, show at their best Roberts's most enduring gifts: in his poetry a love of nature well served by a keen eye for local color and detail, a good ear for clean, clear rhythm and rhyme, and a forceful, uncluttered narrative line; and in fiction a talent for presenting his abiding perception of universal struggles between good and evil either in mythic tales of adventure or in regional stories animated by local settings, customs, and dialects.

Roberts was born on 7 July 1877 in the old rectory in Fredericton, the youngest child of the Reverend Goodridge Roberts, the rector of Fredericton...