Background
Grove was born Felix Paul Greve in Radomno, West Prussia (now Poland).
(Settlers of the Marsh was first published in 1925, after ...)
Settlers of the Marsh was first published in 1925, after a struggle by the author to persuade publishers that his first novel would meet public acceptance. Some critics immediately condemned this hypnotic story of the loss of innocence on the Manitoba frontier, calling it obscene and indecent. Churches issued warnings to their congregations to avoid its scandalous contents. Only several decades later was Settlers of the Marsh recognized for what it is a landmark in the development of the Canadian novel, and a work of realism in the tradition of Thomas Hardy. A psychological portrait of life in the Canadian West, Settlers of the Marsh presents with chilling accuracy the hopes, passions, and anxieties of young pioneers.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0771099614/?tag=2022091-20
(Frederick Philip Groves semi-autobiographical A Search f...)
Frederick Philip Groves semi-autobiographical A Search for America follows young Phil Branden as he wanders from Montreal to the American Midwest in his quest for the real America. Born into a privileged European family whose fortunes have collapsed, Branden must remake himself in North America, shedding his Old World attitudes as he is absorbed into the immigrant underclass. In each of his new occupations waiter, salesman, hobo, labourer Branden encounters greed, cruelty, and deceit, yet he also glimpses the promise of a new social order struggling to be born. First published in 1927, A Search for America is a novel of wonderful range and vision, a fascinating portrait of North American society in the early years of the twentieth century.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0771099576/?tag=2022091-20
(Originally published in 1947, this is Frederick Philip Gr...)
Originally published in 1947, this is Frederick Philip Grove's last and most unique book. In the tradition of Orwell's 'Animal Farm', Grove examines the idea of a utopian society through the story of a group of travelling ants who find themselves in North America. An amateur scientist encounters the colony and makes telepathic contact with a very special elder of the ant community. In fact, the ant infuses the scientist with her memory and uses her new friend as a medium through which she tells the colony's incredible story, a tale that holds up a mirror to our culture, demonstrating to both worlds the parallels and contrasts between the pastoral ways of the ants and the North American life of excess. This classic Canadian novel is back in print for the first time in 20 years, allowing readers to more completely assess Grove's body of works. Fans of speculative fiction will be delighted to see that his prose is as fresh as it was 50 years ago. This was Grove's last novel, and it stands as a testament both to his writing and his prescience.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1895837227/?tag=2022091-20
( "In publishing Frederick Philip Grove's The Adventure o...)
"In publishing Frederick Philip Grove's The Adventure of Leonard Broadus, Rock's Mills Press has brought to light a boys' adventure novel that some will regard as a Canadian classic. Recommended." -- Ruth Latta, CM Magazine. "This novel is a fast-paced action adventure in which a thirteen-year-old boy, Leonard Broadus, works with the police to detect and capture a gang of thieves who are operating near the Lake Erie shoreline of Ontario in the 1930s. Leonard uses the skills of a farmboy in attempting to avoid capture by an unknown enemy and the intuition of a detective to solve what appears to be a mystery without an answer. The author, Frederick Phillip Grove, tells a tale which features the towns and topography of the area just north of the Lake Erie shoreline and the ambiance of the Depression of the 1930s and connects young Leonard Broadus with the visit, and the persons, of the King and Queen in their visit to Toronto and Niagara Falls in 1939." --John Passfield, author of Pinafore Park Frederick Philip Grove (18711948) wrote a single childrens novel in his lifetime, a gripping tale of survival, resourcefulness, and intrigue set in Depression-era Ontario. The novel was first published in 1939 as installments in a church magazine, heavily redacted and poorly publicized. The Adventure of Leonard Broadus is now available here, in Groves original composition. The coming-of-age story begins with a robbery and a runaway raft adventure. In the style of classic childrens literature like Swallows and Amazons and Huckleberry Finn, the danger that follows soon begins to feel very real. The fast-moving and very readable narrative depicts Leonards resourcefulness and endurance, qualities that enable him to survive some alarming circumstances. Grove was a first-rate writer and story-teller, with keen abilities as a realist. He was also a man of many sides who had emigrated to Canada from a dark past in Europe. Ontario in the late 1930s is depicted as a very different society than today, with impoverished hobos travelling the countryside. Leonards adventure may well recall some of Groves own early travels in the new world.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1772440043/?tag=2022091-20
Grove was born Felix Paul Greve in Radomno, West Prussia (now Poland).
In Hamburg he graduated with the Abitur from the Gymnasium Johanneum in 1898. After studying classical languages and archaeology in Bonn, he became a prolific translator of world literature.
He may have taught school in Kentucky and traveled as a harvest hand in the Middle West. This itinerant experience, which may have taken up as much as 2 years of his life, appears to have had a profound effect on his writing.
In 1912 Grove appeared in Haskett, Manitoba, where he became a teacher in a small rural school. In 1915 he settled down to a 9-year career at various levels of primary and intermediate education. He began to write and studied for an extramural degree from the University of Manitoba. The Groves were outstanding teachers, and he was noted in particular for his enthusiasm and enlightened and progressive views.
Grove's first book was over Prairie Trails (1922); it was followed by another collection of essays based on his Manitoba experiences, The Turn of the Year (1923). These books are distinguished by a freedom of style and a control of language admirably suited to the evocation of the climate, the scenery, and the variable moods of the Manitoba prairie. A third collection of essays, It Needs To Be Said (1929), is a distillation of his speeches and thought on culture and society.
Grove is best known for his novels, which are frequently divided into the "prairie novels" and the "Ontario novels. " Two of the prairie novels—Our Daily Bread (1928) and Fruits of the Earth (1933)—can be described with one of the Ontario novels, Two Generations (1939), as being novels of the soil. In them Grove presents a self-centered and single-minded protagonist who labors unremittingly at taming the soil in order to found the basis of "a new world which might serve as the breeding-place of a civilization to come. " In Settlers of the Marsh (1925) and The Yoke of Life (1930) Grove again uses a pioneer prairie setting, but he explores human relationships and the psychological elements that underlie them. He holds that man acts not out of reason but as a result of passion. Human passion drives man to irrational and tragic conflict within himself, and man is fated to defeat and destruction by forces which are beyond his control and which he neither understands nor recognizes.
In The Master of the Mill (1944), Grove's most ambitious and complex work, he tells the story of a family whose growth to power and wealth parallels in nearallegorical terms the development of Canada as a confederated nation. The major themes are the rise of modern capitalism, generational conflict, and the rise and fall of family fortunes as these are linked with the drive to materialistic power, the realization of creative ideals, and the decay of mind and vision.
Grove's autobiographical work, now questioned as to factual reliability, comprises A Search for America (1927) and In Search of Myself (1946). In the latter he states that the tragic quality of man's existence is heightened in the North American experience. He believes that American civilization is characterized by mass production which destroys the artist and by a standardization of life which erodes individuality. He gave himself to fantasy-satire in his last published work, Consider Her Ways (1947), an unrecognized but unusually clever, successful, and prophetic "study" of an expedition of ants engaged on a research project on man.
In the latter part of his life Grove was well known as a public lecturer. He lived briefly in Ottawa, where he was a director of the Graphic Press, and then moved to a farm outside Simcoe, Ontario, where he worked as a dairy farmer and struggled with his writing.
(Frederick Philip Groves semi-autobiographical A Search f...)
( "In publishing Frederick Philip Grove's The Adventure o...)
(Settlers of the Marsh was first published in 1925, after ...)
(Originally published in 1947, this is Frederick Philip Gr...)
Quotations:
"A book is a book only when it is read; otherwise it is a bundle of gathered sheets of soiled paper. "
"Where knowledge is denied, faith comes in. "
"If the desire to get somewhere is strong enough in a person, his whole being, conscious and unconscious, is always at work, looking for and devising means to get to the goal. "
In 1915 he married Catherine Weins, a fellow teacher.