Robertson Davies

Educated at Upper Canada College, Queen's, and Oxford, Davies was an actor at the Old Vic in London before returning to Canada to edit the Peterborough Examiner. In 1963, he was appointed the inaugural Master of Massey College at the University of Toronto, sporting a majestic white beard.

His masterwork, Fifth Business (1970), launched the celebrated Deptford Trilogy, weaving Jungian psychology, hagiography, and mystery from the starting point of a snowball thrown in a small Ontario town. The first Canadian admitted to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Davies was a perennial Nobel Prize candidate.