Charles Frederick Bodsworth is known to a wide range of magazine readers as a versatile and prolific journalist with a particular interest in wildlife. His permanent reputation, however, will depend upon his fiction, which invariably concerns itself with the relationship between human beings and their natural environment.

The son of Arthur John and Viola Williams Bodsworth, he was born at Port Burwell, Ontario (a small community on the northern shore of Lake Erie, southeast of London), where his father worked as a tinsmith. His teens coincided with the Depression, which prevented him from extending his formal education beyond high school. He worked for a time in the tobacco fields and on tugs on the lake, but in 1940 he obtained a job as reporter on a local newspaper, the St. Thomas Times-Journal. From there he moved in 1943 to the Toronto Daily Star and Weekly Star. A year later, he...