Letter to the Past [first edition]

George Woodcock, author of almost 50 books, now turns to his own story in Letter to the Past: An Autobiography. Although he was born in Winnipeg in 1912, Woodcock grew up in England. His memories of adolescence and young manhood take the reader through two World Wars and a Depression, before his return to Canada in 1949. Those whom he knew and who influenced him emerge in penetrating detail from Woodcock’s narrative: his father, dying of Bright’s Disease, yet with his spirit of adventure unquenched; his friend, George Orwell, “butter-fingeredly rolling cigarettes of the strongest black shag he could find and drinking tea as dark and almost as thick as treacle”; and the teeming London political and literary figures of the ‘30s and ‘4Os he knew as editor of the spritely literary journal, NOW, and as a young anarchist and writer. George Woodcock, winner of the Governor General’s Award and the Molson Prize, now lives in Vancouver, where he founded and edited for many years Canadian Literature. He has written countless articles and books, including critical studies of novelists Hugh MacLennan and Mordecai Richler and artist Ivan Eyre, as well as biographies of George Orwell, Thomas Merton, Oscar Wilde and Kropotkin, and the panoramic study of Canada entitled The Canadians. Here is what the critics have said of Letter to the Past: “It is not so much that chronicling the lives of William Godwin, Kropotkin, and Proudhon has constituted for Woodcock a profession like that of a portraitist; more that the underlying emotional attributes of anarchism a profound distrust of all authority mixed with a liberal dash of utopianism — have been the informing principles in his life.” — Saturday Night “The graceful prose is so rich in detail that its effect is almost that of a life invented, not remembered.”— Maclean’s