Raymond Knister left left behind a number of manuscript following his sudden dealth.In 2006, Black Moss released the never before published There Was A Mr. Cristi. The novel was, according toKnister’s daughter, ImogenKnister Givens, inspired by Knister’s sister-in-law Minnie Gamble and herexperiences in a Toronto rooming house. Many of the novel’s characters and situations are drawn from actual individuals who his sister-inlaw encountered during her stay. The central Ms. Campbell character was inspired by Minnie herself. After Knister’s death in 1932, his wife gave her sister, Minnie, the original manuscript in memory of Raymond, as many of the stories he intertwined in the novel were the same stories she had once shared with him regarding her time spent in a Toronto rooming house during the 1920s.

Knister’s global reputation as an authored was overshadowedshadowed by the Great Depression. With new interest in Canadian heritage since the 1970s, his work is being celebrated and recognized again. This novel was never forgotten but Minnie Gamble Acton-Bond had the only copy. In the 1990s, Imogen Givens asked Mary Harris, Minnie’s daughter, to try to locate it, and once the manuscript was found it was returned to Imogen Givens.

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.

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