Sinclair Ross (James Sinclair Ross) Biography

Canadian novelist and short-story writer, born near Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. He was a bank employee throughout his working life. After retirement he travelled to Europe, where he lived in Athens, Barcelona, and Malaga, before returning to Canada and settling in Vancouver in 1980. Ross is often regarded as a onebook novelist. His masterpiece, As for Me and My House (1941), is a classic study of the constraints of small town prairie life during the Depression years, as experienced by a minister who is an artist manqué and his equally thwarted wife, whose diary is the narrative medium of the tale and who is one of Western Canadian fiction's most complex and ambiguous characters. Two of his other novels, The Well (1958) and Whir of Gold (1970), juxtapose Montreal and Saskatchewan values by relocating a character from one of these environments in the other. His fourth novel, Sawbones Memorial (1974), is centred on a retirement party for a Saskatchewan doctor with the action confined to a single evening, and again focusing on the hypocrisies of small town prairie life. The Lamp at Noon (1968) and The Race and Other Stories (1982) are collections of short stories.