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W.O. Mitchell

W.O. Mitchell is a famous Canadian writer, teacher and playwright. His work has earned him a considerable number of honors including having his image placed on a postage stamp; becoming a member of the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada and having two Canadian schools named after him. His work Jake and the Kid (1950-56) won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour and his novel Who Has Seen the Wind (1947) sold close to a million copies in Canada alone when it appeared. Mitchell has been referred to as the Mark Twain of Canadian literature and has received honorary doctorates from several Canadian universities.

William Ormand Mitchell was born in Weyburn, Saskatchewan on March 13th, 1914. That is where he developed his incredible ability to describe the prairie landscape which he often paired with themes of loneliness and destruction. One focus of Mitchell’s stems from “the energy of death” which is a theme heavily influenced by the death of his father when he was seven years old. Another influence in his early life which added to his interest in motifs of mortal

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W.O. Mitchell, 1914-1998

Over his sixty-year writing career W.O. Mitchell wrote short stories, novels, magazine articles, radio and television plays, stage plays (including a musical), and film scripts. His work won numerous awards, including two Stephen Leacock awards, the Chalmers Canadian Play Award, and three ACTRA awards. Through his reading performances, he became known as Canada's Mark Twain. Perhaps no other Canadian writer has been so versatile, not only in art form, but in audience appeal. He is best known for his "Jake and the Kid" stories, dramatized in CBC's radio series in the 1950s, and for Who Has Seen the Wind, a Canadian classic that has sold over three-quarters of a million copies in Canada alone and is taught in schools and universities across Canada.

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W.O. Mitchell Biography

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WILLIAM ORMOND MITCHELL (1914-1998)

W.O. Mitchell--writer, performer, and teacher--is best remembered for Who Has Seen the Wind and the Jake and the Kid stories which grew out of and defined Saskatchewan prairie.

Mitchell was born on March 13, 1914 in Weyburn, Saskatchewan. Two events in his early life indelibly marked him and, he claimed, made him a writer. When he was seven his father died, and his memory of this event was the genesis for his first novel, Who Has Seen the Wind, a lyrical, episodic work knit together by recurring motifs of birth and death. A deep sense of man’s mortality lies behind all of Mitchell’s writing although his vision of life is fundamentally optimistic.

The second pivotal event occurred in 1926 when he contracted bovine tuberculosis of the wrist and was withdrawn from school. Forced in upon himself, he often wandered alone on the prairies becoming acutely attuned to the “poetry of earth and sky.” Out of this grew his remarkable ability to describe the prairie