George Woodcock is one of Canada's foremost men of letters and the possessor of three distinct reputations. Canadians know him as a literary and social critic, radio dramatist, and editor of the critical quarterly Canadian Literature, from its inception in 1959 until his retirement in 1977. In England, where he spent the first thirty-seven years of his life, he is known as the biographer of William Godwin, Aphra Behn, Oscar Wilde, and of his contemporaries of the 1940s in London--George Orwell, Herbert Read, and Aldous Huxley. He has also achieved international acclaim as a historian of the anarchist movement and biographer of its central thinkers and as the author of travelogues on South America and Asia. His works have been translated into French, Swedish, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and Malayalam.

Five months after his birth in Winnipeg on 8 May 1912, Woodcock's parents, Samuel and Margaret Lewis Woodcock, returned to England. Having...