Robertson Davies

William Robertson Davies (1913–1995) was a Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, and academic widely considered one of the most accomplished men of letters in twentieth-century English Canada. He was born in Thamesville, Ontario, the son of a Welsh-born newspaper publisher, and grew up in small Ontario towns whose social texture would later inform much of his fiction.

He studied at Upper Canada College, Queen's University, and Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a B.Litt. in 1938 with a thesis on boy actors in Shakespeare. After a brief acting career at the Old Vic in London he returned to Canada, edited the Peterborough Examiner for almost two decades, and in 1963 became the first Master of Massey College at the University of Toronto.

Davies's fiction is grouped into three major sequences: the Salterton Trilogy, the Cornish Trilogy, and most famously the Deptford Trilogy — Fifth Business (1970), The Manticore (1972), and World of Wonders (1975). The Deptford books, narrated in part by the schoolmaster Dunstan Ramsay and shaped by Davies's interest in Jungian psychology, hagiography, and stage magic, are usually regarded as his finest achievement; Fifth Business in particular is a fixture of Canadian literature courses.

He was awarded the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction in 1972 and was made a Companion of the Order of Canada the same year. He continued writing and teaching until shortly before his death in Orangeville, Ontario.

Robertson is a Scottish patronymic surname meaning son of Robert, used as a masculine given name; Robert itself derives from Old Germanic Hrodebert, bright fame. He used the masculine form.