The "Dean of Canadian playwrights," John Coulter, was an Ulsterman from Belfast, forty-eight years old when he arrived in Canada in 1936, literally in pursuit of a young writer, Olive Clare Primrose, with whom he had fallen in love in London. They were married in Toronto on 4 July 1936, and, instead of bringing his bride back to London as he had intended, Coulter remained with "Babs" permanently in Toronto. Already a committed dramatist, Coulter brought to Canada the rare talent for perfection of style in playwriting. He also brought the farsightedness of the mature supporter of the arts to a culturally under-developed country, and he plunged immediately into needed organization, cofounding the Canadian Conference of the Arts and supporting, with others, the formation of the Canada Council and the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. Through radio, the press, and finally television, Coulter was persistent in his appeal to young Canadians to produce...