Marian Engel is best known as the author of Bear, which won a Governor General's Award in 1977, but she has written extensively and memorably about urban life in southern Ontario and was also active in writers' causes.

Marian Passmore, the daughter of Frederick Searle and Mary Fletcher Passmore, was born in Toronto in 1933, but the family moved around southwestern Ontario, to Hamilton, Galt, Brantford, and Sarnia, because her father, a teacher of auto mechanics, had to find work wherever it could be had during the Depression. The moves gave her a keen sense of provincial life, with its Puritanism, its materialism, and its distrust of ideas and customs from "Yurp." After receiving her B.A. from McMaster University in 1955, she earned an M.A. from McGill, where her supervisor was Hugh MacLennan; he instilled in her a vital concern for prose style and taught her much about the...