About the Author

In 1941, at the age of eighteen, the author went to Britain with the Canadian Army, then transferred to the RCAF and spent the last year of the war as a pilot with an RCAF transport squadron in Burma. "I had a good war," he says. "I did a full operational tour, never dropped a bomb or fired an angry shot and only got shot at once." After the war he took his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley and for the next twenty-eight years was a professor of German Literature at the University of Toronto. Apart from founding and editing the professional journal Seminar, writing professional articles and reviews, and a monograph on Hermann Hesse, this book represents his only foray into publishing.