SOURCE: An obituary in Los Angeles Times, December 4, 1995, p. A16.

[In the following obituary, Gross and Turner provide an overview of Davies's life and career.]

Robertson Davies, one of Canada's most celebrated novelists and the master of multiple, eclectic careers in theater, journalism and academia, has died.

Davies died Saturday night of a stroke at the age of 82. He had been hospitalized with pneumonia.

Davies' breakthrough as a novelist came with the 1970 publication of Fifth Business, the first work in the renowned Deptford Trilogy, which traced the interconnected lives of three men in the fictional town of Deptford, Ontario, the province where the author was born, spent most of his life and died this weekend.

In the 1970s and again in the 1980s, he produced two more well received trilogies. His last work of fiction, The Cunning Man, was published in 1994.

Explaining how so many of his novels...