(Canada Post’s well-done salute to McLuhan, Northrop Frye, and Roger Lemelin)
(his most famous book; 1983 ed. of 1963 original; this one a rare signed)
(Harcourt, Brace : 1963 pb, rare flatsigned)
(rare 1976 signed reply letter to Margaret Beach–includes Beach’s letter)
(perhaps the most insightful book (Dundurn, 2014) into Frye’s mind, sensibility, and ideas; John Robert Colombo who compiled this labour-of-love book has done over 200 books himself, many on Canadian writers; I would also highly recommend his Canadian Literary Landmarks, Hounslow Press, 1984. Colombo has been a significant contributor to the record on and information about CanLit and its authors.)
(Herman) Northrop Frye (1912-1991) was born in Sherbrooke, PQ and educated in Moncton, at U of T, and Oxford. He was briefly a United Church minister out west before returning to U of T. to become a renowned professor and critic pursuing scholarly studies. His first ‘hit’ was Fearful Symmetry, an amazing, insightful opus about William Blake’s work and imagination; this book began his international reputation. In Fables of Identity, he pared down the most basic patterns in literature, and in his best, most influential book–The Educated Imagination, he ‘explained literature’ and what was ‘really going on in it’ for the average person.
(The latter, in particular in 1976, changed and influenced the way I taught literature for the rest of my 30-year-career as a high-school English teacher and the way I approached writing and editing some 60 plus books and guides. For me, Frye made very clear the patterns, themes, motifs, symbols, and metaphors of all literature and much of pop culture.)
As early as 1958, Frye deservedly won the Lorne Pierce Medal for outstanding service to CanLit. He also went on to write The Great Code (about the Bible’s influence on and connection to literature), The Bush Garden (an overview of CanLit), and edited one of his own mentors’ works: The Collected Poems of E.J. Pratt.
Highly recommended: Harry Rasky’s documentary The Great Teacher: Northrop Frye and John Ayre’s Northrop Frye: A Biography as well as Colombo’s Frye quotations book pictured above.