Non-Fiction Books

Outlining the delights of reading, the author tells of what mass education has done to readers, to taste, to books and to culture. The book covers writers from various countries and old and recently-published books, both well-known and obscure. From the author of "What's Bred in the Bone".

If Hamlet was right, and the theatre does hold the mirror up to nature, what kind of nature did a play such as The Vampyre reflect in its glass? And what relation does it bear to the generally accepted master works of the nineteenth-century stage, the plays of Ibsen and Shaw, for example? In this book Robertson Davies explores in loving detail the world of nineteenth-century melodrama - the plays, the actors, and the theatres themselves - to find the answers to these and other questions. It is the distillation of a lifetime's experience as audience, actor, teacher, and reader, and Davies shares with us this experience and the delights inherent in it. Explore with him the world of William the simple tailor and his black-eyed Susan; and of innumerable Millers' Daughters, all with fatal attraction, no power of resistance, and uncommon fecundity. Discover the nature and causes of Heroine's Disease. Watch for the Melancholy Man with his discreditable secret. And in the process learn a new or renew an old pleasure in the nineteenth-century stage.

Now in paperback, the book that marked the first appearance in the United States of Robertson Davies's mischievous alter ego, Samuel Marchbanks.

Readers around the world continue to mourn the 1995 death of a beloved literary icon, but this rich and varied collection of Robertson Davies' writings on the world of books and the miracle of language captures his inimitable voice and sustains his presence among us. Coming almost entirely from Davies' own files of unpublished material, these twenty-four essays and lectures range over themes from "The Novelist and Magic" to "Literature and Technology," from "Painting, Fiction, and Faking," to "Can a Doctor Be a Humanist?" and "Creativity in Old Age." For devotees of Davies and all lovers of literature and language, here is the "urbanity, wit, and high seriousness mixed by a master chef" — Cleveland Plain Dealer Vintage delights from an exquisite literary menu. Davies himself says merely: "Lucky writers. . . like wine, die rich in fruitiness and delicious aftertaste, so that their works survive them." • Viking will publish Robertson Davies' Happy Alchemy in July 1998 • Many fine works by Robertson Davies are available from Penguin including The Deptford Trilogy, The Cornish Trilogy , and The Salterton Trilogy

A collection of letters by one of the nation's greatest writers and poets includes Davies's correspondence with John Gielgud, Margaret Atwood, and Salvador Dali, among many others. 10,000 first printing.

A posthumous treasury of brilliant essays that shines with Davies's unmistakable wit, erudition, and magic. One of Canada's--and the world's--most beloved authors, Robertson Davies was also a devoted fan of opera and the theater. In this follow-up to his first posthumous collection, A Merry Heart , Davies ruminates on these lifelong passions, offering a diverse sampling of personal reflections on everything from the ancient Greeks to Lewis Carroll, Scottish folklore to Laurence Olivier, the sins of Verdi to the virtues of melodrama. The combined effect of these thirty-three essays, lectures, plays, and librettos-- edited by his widow and daughter--is true alchemy, as "readers . . . come away with a renewed appreciation of the ease with which Davies routinely transformed his sometimes erudite passions into delightful entertainments" ( The New York Times Book Review ). The book in thoroughly entertaining fashion acquaints us with Davies' expansive erudition and gift for rendering literary and historical complexities in simple, human terms." -- The New York Times "Lovingly collected. . . . A welcome addition to a corpus like no other in contemporary literature." -- Kirkus Reviews

On his publishers: They are so insufferably pretentious in theory and such botchers in practice. On his role as Master: God, how I loathe the young. Do you suppose we were such grasping, crooked, self-important cabbageheads as these? On projected BBC radio talks: They want me to give Marchbanks’ impressions of Britain. They seem to have some notion that I am a newcomer to these shores, chewing tobacco and swinging my lariat as I gape at the sights. I shall strive to oblige. Robertson Davies was 25 and a student at Oxford when these letters begin. By the end of the book, in 1975, he has become the magisterial author of the Deptford Trilogy, Fifth Business, The Manticore and World of Wonders. The letters show us his career in all its variety. He was – among other things – an actor at the Old Vic in London, a newspaperman in Peterborough, Ontario, and a playwright who writes despairingly that “I am getting to hate and despise actors more every day.” A surprising theme is his constant disappointment with his achievements. Although happily married with three daughters, the editor of a respected newspaper, a major national book reviewer, and the author of several well-received plays and half a dozen books, he feels that he has failed. Even when in 1961 he switches careers to become the founding Master of Massey College and to teach Drama at the University of Toronto his doubts persist. It is only in the later years that he begins to sense that his life has not been wasted. The book’s greatest charm, however, lies in his letters to the great (letters to H.L. Mencken, Alfred Knopf, Hugh Maclennan, Tyrone Guthrie, Margaret Laurence, among others) and to the not-so-great – like the arrogant applicant for a job at his newspaper who received blistering advice on professionalism. All are written with great style appropriate to the occasion. For above all Robertson Davies was a professional. His astonishingly revealing letters show a promising young man turning into a great literary figure.