James sinclair ross biography

The fictional town of Horizon bears some resemblance to Arcola.

James sinclair ross biography

At that time, he also travelled to Regina for a term in the Conservatory of Music at Regina College, taking advanced music studies. He was an accomplished pianist and organist, playing in the churches of various communities. In April , Ross transferred to a bank position in Winnipeg, and moved there with his mother. Bentley, the otherwise unnamed wife of Philip Bentley, a failed artist and church minister.

The novel was ignored by a readership looking for wartime escapism, and Ross himself perceived the novel as a failed venture. Nevertheless, As For Me and My House was reprinted in paperback and eventually recognized as one of the finest novels of modern Canadian literature. Ross enlisted in the Canadian Army in and was sent overseas with the Ordnance Corps; he was stationed in London until Ross's first novel, As for Me and My House, did not create a sensation when it appeared in , partly because it moved outside wartime preoccupations.

It was a novel written with beautiful spareness, but perhaps its lack of a broad appeal was also due to the fact that what it told was too near to the recent past of Depression experience. Further, the community of Horizon, which Ross imagined, was too reminiscent of the places so many of its potential readers were hoping sometime to escape.

Only as the Horizons of reality began to pass into history did the novel gain a popular readership, but it quickly won its place as a classic of Canadian fiction. Ross, as Margaret Laurence among other remembered so warmly, became an example for younger novelists, though none of his later longer works equaled As for Me and My House. Ross continued to write stories and occasionally publish them, though illness later reduced his energy and his production as he retreated to a largely reclusive life, first in Spain and then in Vancouver.

But, curiously, he never seemed strongly moved to publish a collection, even when publishers began once again to show interest in the short story during the s. He died in Vancouver on February 29, Ross is best known for three titles. The Lamp at Noon and Other Stories collects the works of short fiction he wrote in the s and s. These stories chronicle the physical and psychological hardships of living and working on isolated Prairie farms during the drought and depression of the s.

They dramatize the heroic determination that kept the settlers from defeat as well as the pride that cut them off from nearly all contact with others. Ross's major novel, As for Me and My House , is the story of the Reverend Philip Bentley and his unnamed wife, their loveless marriage, and their efforts to escape from the small Prairie town in which they are living.