Walt Wingfield has decided to live the life many a city-dweller dreams of — moving to the country and buying a farm. Quitting his job as a Toronto stockbroker, Walt buys a hundred-acre farm on the edge of the Canadian Shield and determines to make a living using only two old racehorses and a single-furrow plow. In a series of letters to the editor of the local newspaper, Walt chronicles his struggles, modest successes and spectacular failures. The final crisis comes in his third year on the land, when he must decide whether to give it all up and return to the world of finance that he knows best. In this Canadian classic, Dan Needles has brought to life a marvelously evocative rural community. Walt Wingfield's brave attempt to embrace a less complicated world constitutes the triumph of a clear-eyed spirit over human frailty and opens the door to a world lost to most.

DAN NEEDLES is the creator of the popular Wingfield Farm plays, full-length stage comedies that have filled theatres across Canada and the United States for more than 3,000 performances since 1984. Wingfield’s Inferno, the sixth in the series of plays starring Rod Beattie, opens at the Stratford Festival in 2005. A 21-part CBC television series, based on the first four plays, aired in 2001. In 2003, With Axe & Flask, a history of fictional Persephone Township, won the Stephen Leacock Medal for humour. A regular columnist for Harrowsmith-Country Life and Country Guide, Dan Needles lives with his wife, Heath, and their four children on a small farm near Collingwood, Ontario.

D. Needles' profile page

DAN NEEDLES is the creator of the popular Wingfield Farm plays, full-length stage comedies that have filled theatres across Canada and the United States for more than 3,000 performances since 1984. Wingfield’s Inferno, the sixth in the series of plays starring Rod Beattie, opens at the Stratford Festival in 2005. A 21-part CBC television series, based on the first four plays, aired in 2001. In 2003, With Axe & Flask, a history of fictional Persephone Township, won the Stephen Leacock Medal for humour. A regular columnist for Harrowsmith-Country Life and Country Guide, Dan Needles lives with his wife, Heath, and their four children on a small farm near Collingwood, Ontario.

Dan Needles' profile page