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Born in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, author,
essayist, playwright, radio and television dramatist and raconteur W.O.
Mitchell is known for his quintessential book of Prairie boyhood, Who Has
Seen the Wind, published in 1947.
His Alberta connection began in the 1950s when he set up residence in High
River, south of Calgary. He would later move to Calgary, which would
remain his home until his death in February 1998.
Throughout his career, Mitchell would write for CBC Radio (Jake and the
Kid), film (produced and unproduced screenplays for Alien Thunder and Who
Has Seen the Wind), serve as a fiction editor for Maclean's Magazine, and
publish fiction (Who Has Seen the Wind, The Kite, Jake and the Kid,
According to Jake and the Kid, Vanishing Point, Roses Are Difficult Here,
For Art's Sake, How I Spent My Summer Holidays, Since Daisy Creek and
Ladybug, Ladybug). A collection of performance pieces presented at
readings and other dramatic events was released posthumously as An Evening
With W.O. Mitchell. Scripts to his plays For Those in Peril on the Sea,
The Devil's Instrument, The Black Bonspiel of Wullie MacCrimmon, The Kite,
and Back to Beulah were collected and published by Gage Publishing in 1982
as Dramatic W.O. Mitchell.
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Arts Alberta #124
Mitchell explains the
differences of writing for the stage |
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But it would be as a creative writing teacher where Mitchell would have
arguably his most sustaining influence, as he plied schools, universities
and fine arts schools to show students his free fall method of writing.
Many of these students would have first encountered Mitchell through the
pages of Who Has Seen the Wind. But even that novel was given several
second lives, first as a movie directed by Allan King in 1977, then in an
edition illustrated by painter William Kurelek in 1976, and finally to
celebrate the book's 50th anniversary in 1997. In this edition, Macmillan
Canada restored more than 7,000 words of text removed from the original
when it was edited and published by Little, Brown & Co. in the United
States in 1949. An essay appended to this anniversary edition by the
author's daughter-in-law and literary scholar Barbara reveals that not
even Mitchell himself knew that publishers including McClelland & Stewart,
Stewart-Bantam, and Macmillan of Canada had used the text of the American
edition in Canada. In 1991, McClelland & Stewart, his final publisher,
would release the unexpurgated edition, again with the Kurelek paintings.
Mitchell's oldest son Ormand and Barbara - both of them academics at Trent
University - are currently completing the second volume of their biography
of the author, due for release in 2003. The first volume, W.O.: The Life
of W.O. Mitchell - Beginnings to Who Has Seen the Wind, 1914-1947 was
published in 1999.
