Robertson Davies and Massey College

Robertson Davies (1913-1995) was one of the most recognizable figures in Canadian letters, bearded and given to declaiming rather than conversing. Before he was a novelist he was a journalist, editing and publishing the Peterborough Examiner from 1942 to 1955, before moving to Toronto to teach in the University of Toronto's graduate English program. His appointment as the founding Master of Massey College in 1963 gave him a permanent institutional home and the platform from which he wrote his best-known fiction.

A self-consciously old-fashioned college

Massey College, endowed by the Massey Foundation and designed by architect Ron Thom, opened in 1963 as a small residential community for graduate students, modelled loosely on Oxbridge colleges, complete with High Table dinners and Latin grace before meals. Davies, Master until 1981, shaped its character almost single-handedly, insisting on formality at a university otherwise modernizing quickly around him. His Deptford Trilogy — Fifth Business (1970), The Manticore (1972) and World of Wonders (1975) — was written largely during his Massey years, and he wrote and read aloud an original ghost story to the college community every Christmas, later collected as High Spirits (1982).

Sources

• The Canadian Encyclopedia — Robertson Davies
• Wikipedia — Robertson Davies