Farley Mowat has written twenty-four books since People of the Deer (1952)—which Hugh MacLennan called "the finest thing of its sort to come out of Canada"—and it's a rare and lonely season when no new Mowat graces the stands. This season Peter Davison has saved us with The World of Farley Mowat [a collection of Mowat's work]. Mowat's immense popularity has remained as constant and as changing as his favourite elements, snow and sea…. Adored by the masses and ignored by the critics, Mowat wouldn't have it any other way. He described himself in 1977 as a "storyteller who is far more concerned with reaching his audience than with garnering kudos from the arbiters of literary greatness." When asked more recently where he would place his own work in the mansion of Canadian letters, he bellowed emphatically: "Nowhere! I'm in a room by myself. I'm considered pretentious and artistic by the commercial guys, and too commercial by the artistic guys. And I'm perfectly happy in that position."
Such an ambiguous reflection is difficult to catch in an anthology. (p. 67)
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