David Watmough's literary reputation rests on his semiautobiographical tales chronicling the life of Davey Bryant. Watmough's persona takes readers with relentless candor on a picaresque journey from childhood in Cornwall, through Europe, the United States, and finally to the west coast of Canada--but always the journey is primarily within himself. As an excursion into memory, Watmough's fiction has elicited comparisons with Proust's; as a monodramatist in the Celtic oral tradition, with over 2,000 public performances, Watmough has been called a Canadian Dylan Thomas.

Watmough, the son of Gerald and Ethel Bassett Watmough, was born in London, England, but grew up on his family's farm in Cornwall, the landscape that was to inspire the bulk of his later fictional material. After a year of schooling in London, a job as reporter for a Cornish newspaper, and a short stint in the Royal Navy, Watmough entered King's College, London University, as...