"Once when I was a small boy," wrote Wilfrid Eggleston in his memoirs, While I Still Remember: A Personal Record (1968), "I had a vivid dream in which I saw a row of books on a shelf and knew that they were mine, that I had written every one of them." When this dream finally came true, though, few were the pure literature he had hoped to write. But if his name is not widely known in literary circles, still he made a significant impact in the arena of journalism. Counting only his commissioned books, articles, and newsletters, his "bread and butter" writing, as he called it, would fill several shelves. For all his journalistic exploits, however, the fact remains that Eggleston would rather have been a poet. And the fountainhead for all his creative yearnings was his boyhood on the Alberta prairie.

Born 25 March 1901 in Lincoln, England, to...