Arthur Stringer will probably be remembered by Canadians for his trilogy of prairie novels (1915-1922), despite the fact that he spent his long and prolific writing career in Ontario, New York, and New Jersey. He experienced the prairies only during a brief and expensive failed attempt at grain-farming in southern Alberta just before World War I.

Arthur John Arbuthnott Stringer was born in Chatham, Ontario, on 26 February 1874, the son of Hugh Arbuthnott and Sally Delmege Stringer. His childhood in Chatham and in London, Ontario, where his family moved ten years later, provided the raw material for one of his Canadian books, Lonely O'Malley: A Story of Boy LIfe (1905). For all its heavily ironic tone, the novel sentimentalizes the forms of lying, cheating, and petty theft traditionally thought to distinguish a healthy boyhood.

Stringer enjoyed early recognition for his writing. While a student at the University of Toronto (from...