Poet, fiction writer, critic, anthologist, and journalist, Raymond Knister was in Canadian writing of the 1920s and early 1930s an active and important force for imagism, for spare prose, and for themes of rural and everyday life. Knister published in all genres in Canada, the United States, and Britain. His death at age thirty-three meant he had little time to establish his popular and scholarly reputation, but in recent years that reputation has been secured, assuring him permanent status both as a skilled writer and as one of the initiators of modernism in Canadian letters.

Born on a farm near Comber in North Essex County, Ontario, John Raymond Knister grew up in close contact with the rural environment that would directly inform his fiction, his poetry, and his literary philosophies. His family, of German and Scottish extraction, stressed hard work and achievement, and young Knister's life revolved around...