Prompted by actress Ruth Gordon and encouraged by Thornton Wilder, Timothy Findley began to write seriously in 1956. Yet for twenty years he was best known as an actor and author of radio and television dramas and documentaries. He won the 1971 Armstrong Award (radio) for The Journey and the 1975 ACTRA Award (television, best documentary writer) for his adaptation, in collaboration with William Whitehead, of Pierre Berton's two-volume history of the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, The National Dream (1971-1972). Findley's writing went largely unnoticed until 1978, when Penguin published the paperback edition of The Wars. Now he is an enormously successful author of novels and short fictions (with an annual income, in 1981, of close to six figures), his international reputation second only to that of Margaret Atwood .

Findley, the son of Allan Gilmore and Margaret Bull Findley, was born in Toronto, 30 October 1930. His family was once affluent. His grandfather...