The Gentle Anarchist: A Life of George Woodcock

George Woodcock (1912-95), often called Canada’s most important man of letters, found fame as the author of Anarchism, which did much to shape the viewpoint of the 1960s generation, and The Crystal Spirit, his pioneering study of his friend George Orwell. Yet these are only two of the nearly 150 books he published during an astonishing career, lasting almost sixty years, as poet and historian, critic and playwright, biographer and essayist, radical pamphleteer and travel writer extraordinaire.

This great champion of Canadian literature was in his late thirties when he arrived from Britain--and in his mid-forties when he finally settled for good in his beloved Vancouver. Fleeing romantic and political entanglements in London (including the reverberations of a sensational trial at the Old Bailey), Woodcock reinvented himself through immigration, to the extent of virtually giving himself a new personality befitting his new environment. The Gentle Anarchist balances Woodcock’s interior existence with his professional self and explores the benevolent demons that pushed him to heroic feats of composition and kindness.