Raymond Knister had a strong sense of commitment both to his own career and to literature, particularly Canadian literature. In his ten working years he proved himself a prolific writer with wide-ranging interests.

Although his work has appeared in many anthologies of Canadian literature, there remains a great deal of out of print or unpublished material.

This volume brings together not only for his more well-known stories but also all his unpublished stories, a few travel pieces, and several examples of his literary criticism. Knister's stories are often strongly regional, and draw on rural Ontario for their setting and characters. Collected together here for the first time is a group of sketches dealing anecdotally with life in a village in southwestern Ontario. Also included are two stories arising from his experiences as a cab driver in Chicago in the 1920s, 'Innocent Man,' and 'Hackman's Night.' His essays focusing on literary matters and the traditions and problems of Canadian literature show a keenly critical mind.

The First Day of Spring is an important rediscovery of one of Canada's best writers of the 1920s.

Raymond Knister (1899-1932) was a Canadian novelist, short story writer and poet who drowned in Lake St. Clair as he was becoming internationally recognized. A a friend and contemporary of Morley Callaghan, Mr. Knister had just begun to win major prizes, and had been published across the Atlantic alongside Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. He had also edited the first collection of Canadian short stories, and was at work on a number of books before his untimely death. A practitioner of the poetic school known as “imagism,” many of his works evoke rural themes, often depicting life in Southwestern Ontario in the late 1910s and early 1920s.

Raymond Knister's profile page

In the spring of 2001, Douglas Lochhead received the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in English-language Literary Arts from the Lieutenant Governor of New Brunswick. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Member of the Order of Canada, the recipient of honorary doctorates from several universities, Professor Emeritus at Mount Allison University, Senior Fellow and Founding Librarian at Massey College, University of Toronto, and a life member of the League of Canadian Poets. After beginning his career as an advertising copywriter, he became a librarian, a professor of English, a specialist in typography and fine hand printing, and a bibliographer, scholar, and editor — indeed, he has characterized himself as “an unrepentant generalist.” At Mount Allison University, he was a founder and the director of the Centre for Canadian Studies, and he held the Edgar and Dorothy Davidson Chair in Canadian Studies.

Douglas Lochhead's profile page

Peter Stevens (1928-2009) was a professor emeritus of English at the University of Windsor.

Peter Stevens' profile page