W. O. Mitchell (William Ormond Mitchell) Biography

Canadian novelist, born in Saskatchewan, educated at the Universities of Manitoba and Alberta. His best book, Who Has Seen the Wind (1947), a novel about a Prairie boyhood, captures vividly ‘moments when an enquiring heart seeks finality, and the chain of darkness is broken’. Margaret Laurence has said of his ‘Jake and the Kid’ stories published in Maclean's in the 1940s (and later translated to radio and film): ‘these stories were among the first that many of us who lived on the prairies had ever read concerning our own people, our own place and our own time.’ Thirteen of the stories were published in Jake and the Kid (1961). Their oral flavour helped to bring a new dimension into Canadian literature. Later works include The Kite (1962), The Vanishing Point (1973), and How I Spent My Summer Holidays (1981). The successful 1967 musical Wild Rose (with Norris Surdin) marked a new departure, while the play Back to Beulah (1973) reflected his sure perception of small town life; Dramatic W. O. Mitchell (1982) collected five plays, including The Devil's Instrument from 1949. The novel Since Daisy Creek was published in 1984, and Ladybug, Ladybug … in 1988.