SOURCE: "Raymond Knister: A Biographical Note," in Journal of Canadian Fiction, Vol. IV, No. 2, 1975, pp. 175-92.

In the following excerpt, Waddington traces connections between events in Knister's life and works.

Knister's profound sympathy and understanding for the farming people with whom he grew up is continually revealed in his art. He believed that one of the functions of literature was to heighten cultural awareness. "When a literature has been built up from the soil of a country and the lives of its people", he wrote, "the latter become conscious in a new way of those scenes and that life" [quoted in Dorothy Livesay's "Memoir," in Collected Poems of Raymond Knister 1949]. He felt himself bound to express the truth about his community, the people who comprised it, and their way of life. "There was something about the life that I had lived, and all the other farm people around...