Earle Birney

Earle Birney (1904-1995), born in Calgary, the son of a farmer who became a decorative painter, grew up in Banff and then in an orchard in British Columbia, near Creston. With studies often interrupted to earn a living, he defended in Toronto in 1936 a thesis on irony in Chaucer and was active in the thirties among the Trotskyists. A major in charge of personnel selection during the Second World War, he drew from it a comic novel crowned with the Leacock Medal. He created at the University of British Columbia the country's first creative writing course, and died in Toronto at the age of ninety-one.

In the catalogue 1

• PoetryDavid and Other PoemsEarle Birney · 1942Literature