George Elliott's The Kissing Man (1962) has gradually acquired for its author a firmly established reputation as one of the important chroniclers of small-town life in Ontario and a secure place in the tradition of fictional treatments of this subject that begins in the nineteenth century with Sara Jeannette Duncan's The Imperialist (1904), receives classic expression in Stephen Leacock's Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), and has continued with Alice Munro's Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) and Lives of Girls and Women (1971).

Elliott was born in London, in southwestern Ontario. As a young man he worked for a time in radio and as a journalist before beginning a successful career as an advertising executive. Elliott's work has had no direct connection with his fiction, but the area of Ontario in which he was born and raised provided him with the settings and themes for The Kissing Man.

The book is...