Read the following biographical information about W.O. Mitchell. As you read, think about whether information such as this about a writer helps you better understand a literary work. Afterward, discuss as a class the importance of knowing a fiction writer’s life history when reading his or her fiction.

A Prairie Boy
William Ormond Mitchell was born in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, in 1914, the second of Ormond and Margaret Mitchell’s four sons. His parents had moved west from Southwestern Ontario, and his father was a prosperous druggist with his own pharmacy. For the first seven years of his life, Mitchell led an idyllic prairie boy upbringing. Much of his writings about prairie boyhood are based on his youth.

But when Mitchell was only seven years old, his father died suddenly of complications following gall bladder surgery. At the age of 12 Mitchell developed a tubercular wrist. He was taken out of school for a year, and then his mother moved the family, first to California and later to Florida during the winters for the sake of his health. Mitchell completed his high school education in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Mitchell enrolled in elocution lessons—his father had been a popular elocutionist—and his drama teacher encouraged him to apply to the Yale Drama School because Mitchell had a flair for the dramatic. However, he enrolled instead in premedicine at the University of Manitoba at the urging of his mother, who had been a nurse. When his tuberculosis flared up again, he dropped out.

He next moved to Seattle to look for work. This was the Depression era, and he did odd jobs while taking courses in short story and drama at the University of Washington. He had already sold his first piece of writing, “A Panacea for Panhandlers,” to a campus magazine. It was based on his diary of his travels around Europe. He also acted in a Seattle repertory theatre for three years, and wrote newspaper copy and plays on the side. In 1936 he moved to Calgary, where he worked in journalism and insurance.

Mitchell enrolled in the University of Alberta in 1940. Two years later he married Merna Hirtle, the daughter of a Baptist pastor. With his BA completed Mitchell began teaching school in a variety of Alberta communities: Castor, New Dayton, High River, and the Eden Valley Reserve. He also continued to write. The Mitchells’ first son, Ormond, was born in 1943. Hugh followed three years later, and a third child, daughter Willa, was born in 1954.

Early Success
While a student at the University of Alberta, Mitchell was deeply influenced by Professor F.M. Salter, his creative writing teacher. His first short stories were published in 1942 in the Queens Quarterly and Maclean’s magazine. Salter encouraged Mitchell to write the Jake and the Kid stories, and at this time he also began formulating the ideas for his first novel.

Who Has Seen the Wind was published in 1947 by both Macmillan in Toronto, and Little, Brown in Boston. The book was an immediate success, earning Mitchell $14 000 in royalties, an enormous sum of money in those days. Only a few short years earlier he had been making $1100 per year as a school teacher.

Mitchell’s first novel is a coming-of-age story about a boy named Brian. Through the course of his relationship with an older boy named Young Ben and by dealing with the sudden death of his father, Brian examines the meaning of life and death. The prairie wind is a significant metaphor throughout the novel.

Although the success of his book enabled Mitchell to begin writing full-time, it was a hard act to follow. His publisher, Douglas Gibson of McClelland & Stewart, has noted that Mitchell wrote more novels in the last 20 years of his life than he did in the 30 years immediately following Who Has Seen the Wind.

The Dramatic W.O.
From 1948 to 1951, the Mitchells lived in Toronto, where Mitchell worked as the fiction editor for Maclean’s. His first radio play, The Devil’s Instrument, was produced by the CBC in 1949. In 1950, the radio series Jake and the Kid began running. It would produce a total of 320 episodes and run until 1956. Crocus, Saskatchewan, came alive through Mitchell’s eccentric cast of characters revolving around the hired man, Jake, and the boy called Kid.

In 1951 the Mitchells moved back to Alberta, and were to settle in High River for the next 17 years. Mitchell began to write television scripts adapted from his short stories, radio dramas, and stage plays. The Black Bonspiel of Wullie MacCrimmon was produced by CBC-TV in 1965, an adaptation from a radio play originally broadcast in 1951. It would later be published in book form as a novella.

In 1955 Who Has Seen the Wind was produced as a radio play. A collection of short stories based on previously published stories and radio plays was published in 1961 and called simply Jake and the Kid. The radio series was also televised in 1961. In 1967 as part of Canada’s centennial celebrations, a musical written by Mitchell, entitled Wild Rose, was performed in Calgary. A feature film was produced in 1977 based on Who Has Seen the Wind. In 1989 another set of stories, some of them previously unpublished, was published in the collection According to Jake and the Kid.

The Black Bonspiel of Wullie MacCrimmon was staged in 1979 by Theatre Calgary. Mitchell also rewrote The Kite as a stage play, which was performed in 1981. Mitchell’s television drama Back to Beulah was produced as a stage play, and another play, For Those in Peril on the Sea, in 1982. All five of these plays were published in book form in 1982 as Dramatic W.O. Mitchell. An Evening With W.O. Mitchell, a collection of his performance pieces transcribed into text, was published in 1997.

The Literary W.O.
Mitchell’s next lengthy body of writing, The Alien, was published between 1953 and 1954 in serialized form in Maclean’s but never in book form. His second novel, The Kite was published in 1962, 15 years after Who Has Seen the Wind. It too has a theme of the cycle of life and mortality. His third novel, The Vanishing Point, was published in 1973, incorporating parts of the earlier, never-published The Aliens. It received the same level of critical respect as Who Has Seen the Wind, though it hasn’t the popular appeal of his first novel. Set on a Native reserve, it deals with themes of alienation and interdependence. In 1981, How I Spent My Summer Holidays was published, returning to the theme of prairie boyhood, but with a much darker vision than Who Has Seen the Wind.

His fifth and sixth novels followed: Since Daisy Creek in 1984, and Ladybug, Ladybug . . . in 1988. Since Daisy Creek has been called a Canadian Moby Dick and is the story of a failed novelist dealing with mental and physical scars following a grizzly attack. The author searches for healing through his writing. Ladybug, Ladybug . . . moves to an academic setting. It’s a story about a retired English professor attempting to write a biography of Mark Twain.

Roses Are Difficult Here was published in 1990. Its first draft had been completed more than 30 years earlier in 1959. Its central character, Matt Stanley, is the publisher and editor of the Shelby Chinook—the same town of Wullie MacCrimmon fame—and indeed, the eccentric characters of Mitchell’s radio play also appear. Mitchell’s last novel, For Art’s Sake, was published in 1992. This novel returns to the academic setting once again; this time the narrator in the novel is an art professor.

The Teaching W.O.
Mitchell began his working career as a teacher, and he never left that profession behind completely. He was a gifted teacher, and he loved doing it. He was famous for passing on to his writing students what he called Mitchell’s Messy Method, or free-fall, as a technique for allowing the creative juices to begin flowing.

Mitchell was the Writer-in-Residence at several universities across Canada: from 1968 to 1971 at the University of Calgary, in 1973 at the University of Toronto’s Massey College, in 1976 at York University, in Toronto, and from 1979 to 1987 at the University of Windsor. He also taught creative writing at the University of Alberta from 1971 to 1973, and from 1975-85 he was Director of the Writing Division at the Banff Centre for Fine Arts.

The W.O. Mitchell Literary Prize was established in 1997 at a special tribute to Mitchell that took place at the PanCanadian WordFest in Calgary that year. It is designated to be awarded to writers who have been effective mentors to other writers. Mitchell was forever grateful to his mentor, F.M. Salter, and he always taught with that relationship in mind.

W.O. Mitchell’s Legacy
Mitchell has often been compared to the U.S. author Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), and indeed, there is an almost uncanny physical resemblance. Mitchell himself called Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the Great American Novel. Like Twain, Mitchell had the talent to combine comedy and tragedy, something that is difficult to do well. He was unique as a comic novelist in a country with few who write in that genre, and it sometimes masked his literary genius.

Mitchell’s novels deal with a variety of themes, but repeated often is the sense of community. However, he did not sentimentalize the small western town, but rather, portrayed it with an eye of realism. The darker, seamier side of human nature was always present alongside the comedic. Another common theme was that of coming-of-age through lost innocence. Mitchell wrote often of relationships between men, particularly that of student-mentor, such as King Motherwell and Hugh in How I Spent My Summer Holiday.

And always, for Mitchell, the prairie was an agent in his novels as significant to the novel’s flow as any character.

Mitchell’s writing has influenced many writers whose successes came after his, particularly those from the West. Margaret Laurence described Mitchell as the first to write about the Canadian prairies, thereby giving those who lived on the prairie their first opportunity to read about themselves in their own place and time. Sharon Butala describes Mitchell’s writing as a way of validating the lives of those who lived on the prairies. In reading about themselves in works of fiction, a whole generation has been endorsed as a significant people and place. Timothy Findley, while praising Mitchell’s anecdotal writing style as terribly real and vivid, also credits his portrayal of the prairie almost as if Mitchell had invented the place, “because he gave it shape and distance and all its smells and sounds.”

Mitchell was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1973 and a Member of the Privy Council in 1992. He was awarded the Chalmers Award in 1976 for his play Back to Beulah and the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour in 1962 and 1990 for his collections of Jake stories.

Mitchell’s last public appearance was at the annual meeting of the Writer’s Union of Canada in Winnipeg on May 31, 1996. Already sick with prostate cancer, he could not walk and delivered his talk from a wheelchair. He died at his Calgary home at the age of 83 on February 25, 1998.