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obituary

Author Richard B. Wright, in Toronto’s Victoria Memorial Park in 2001, broke out as a major author over 30 years after his debut.Louie Palu/The Globe and Mail

In the 13 novels he left us, Richard Wright investigated the unfolding mystery of human character, depicting the ways in which people face abandonment, rape, bad marriages, job loss, the murder of a child, betrayal, old age and other disappointments and tragedies of existence. He had a gift for making the men and women he pulled from his fertile imagination more alive than many flesh-and-blood individuals the reader might know.

He was a master of diverse writing styles including suspense, historical fiction, the picaresque, dark comedy; he even wrote a children's book. His best-known novel was Clara Callan, which won the 2001 Giller Prize, the Governor-General's Award for English-language fiction and the Trillium Book Award, and sold roughly 200,000 copies. More than three decades after his writing career began, this book helped him break out of the mid-list author designation.

Columnist and critic Robert Fulford, who was on the 2001 Giller jury, recalled: "We Giller judges liked Clara Callan because the story was so unusual and the craft was superb. We had little difficulty arriving at the winner.

"I admire the way he pulled himself up to a level of high professionalism. From 1970 on, I always opened his books with high expectations and was rarely disappointed."

Mr. Wright suffered a massive stroke at St. Catharines Place, a retirement home in St. Catharines, Ont., and died on Feb. 7 in hospital. He was 79. He had moved to the home only two weeks previously, according to his son Christopher.

Richard Bruce Wright was born March 4, 1937, the youngest of five children of Laverne and Laura (née Thomas) Wright in Midland, Ont., on Georgian Bay. Laverne Wright took whatever work he could find during the Depression, including raking leaves in the parks and working at the grain elevator near the port where wheat from the Prairies arrived by boat to be loaded onto rail cars for milling in Toronto and Montreal. While many of his books, including The Weekend Man, The Teacher's Daughter and Final Things, were set in Toronto, the look and feel and social conservatism of Midland were to reappear in his fiction attached to small towns, named Whitfield, Huron Falls and Craven Falls.

The small-town theme, Mr. Fulford observed, "set him apart from most writers of his generation. I think I best understood that while reading his memoir, A Life with Words."

So intent was he on avoiding the narcissism inherent in autobiography that he wrote A Life with Words (2015) in the third person. He described himself as a quiet, watchful child born with a webbed left hand that he took pains to conceal.

At the age of 18, he left Midland for Toronto to study Radio and Television Arts at what was then Ryerson Institute of Technology (now Ryerson University). After graduating in 1959, he worked briefly as a journalist and radio copywriter, then sent out applications to a dozen publishing houses. He received only one reply, from Kildare Dobbs at Macmillan of Canada, then an important house that published Morley Callaghan and Robertson Davies, among others. In 1960, Mr. Wright was hired as assistant editor, eventually moving on to Oxford University Press as manager of trade sales. He drew on his sales experience at Oxford when he wrote The Weekend Man, the 1970 novel about Wes Wakeham, an ironic young salesman for an educational publisher, who refuses to claw and shove his way up the corporate ladder.

The Weekend Man was his second book. The first was Andrew Tolliver, the 1965 children's story about a boy who foils a bank robbery. He had submitted it under a pseudonym to Macmillan while he still worked there and had to sit through a meeting while company president John Gray discussed the book's merits.

While at Macmillan, Mr. Wright met and fell in love with Phyllis Cotton, a secretary for the firm, and the two married. The Weekend Man was written during an extended stay in Phyllis's home village in Quebec's Gaspé region. His next novel, In the Middle of a Life (1973), won the Toronto Book Award and the Faber Prize in England, but Mr. Wright saw that writing would not bring in enough money to support a growing family that now included two sons, Christopher and Andrew. While Phyllis worked as a secretary at Trent University in Peterborough, he took an English degree there, and in 1976, degree in hand, he was hired as a teacher at the elite private school Ridley College, in St. Catharines. Until he retired from teaching in 2001, he taught literature ranging from Chaucer to Rohinton Mistry. According to a former student, the actor Colm Feore, he was beloved by his young charges for the latitude he gave them for self-expression.

Mr. Wright also taught what some would label "creative writing," but he preferred to call it "writing craft." He forbade the use of clichés, stereotypes and false sentiment.

Phyllis attended Niagara College, then Brock University in St. Catharines, and became a librarian at Brock. The two were bound by their shared love of books. His friend, the literary scholar David Staines, professor at the University of Ottawa, says: "They were a splendid pair."

Every morning, Mr. Wright rose at 5 a.m. to write before his teaching duties began. "When we heard the clickety-clack of his typewriter we knew Dad was working," Christopher recalls. A rigorous self-editor, he wrote draft after draft on an IBM Selectric typewriter long after most authors had switched to computers, and the whole family was tasked with helping him find replacement ribbons for this antique. Phyllis keyed the final draft of each book into a computer.

The picaresque Farthing's Fortunes appeared in 1976; next came the shocking Final Things (1980), inspired by the murder of shoeshine boy Emanuel Jaques, followed by The Teacher's Daughter (1982), Tourists (1984) and Sunset Manor (1990).

Then, in 1994, he faced a crisis: His novel The Age of Longing was turned down by two publishers who were unimpressed by his sales figures. The book is about Howard Wheeler, a book editor in his 50s, who goes home to Huron Falls after his mother's death to sell her house. It becomes a portrait of the parents' bitterly unhappy marriage. Editor Phyllis Bruce, who was just then starting her own imprint at HarperCollins, bought the book and it was shortlisted for both the 1995 Giller and the Governor-General's Award.

"I didn't win but the impact of being on that shortlist was huge," Mr. Wright later told The Globe and Mail. "It renewed my confidence and encouraged me to continue writing."

For six years, he worked on his next book, an epistolary novel set in the 1930s about two sisters – Nora, who lights out for an acting career in New York while the other, Clara, stays behind teaching school in the small Ontario town where both were born. The book, Clara Callan, Mr. Wright said, grew out of his curiosity about the inner lives of the unmarried women who taught him as a schoolboy in Midland.

Clara Callan is composed of letters exchanged not only by the sisters but written by three or four other people, as well as diary entries by Clara, a perceptive and passionate woman. Clara, who is 33 at the book's start, is raped by a vagrant while out walking and becomes pregnant. She flees to New York, where her sister and her worldly friend Evelyn find her an abortionist.

Clara returns to life in Whitfield but a trip to Italy with her sister and her sister's paramour stirs up strange longings. (The travellers also witness the rise of fascism in that country.) Back in Canada, Clara meets Frank, an attentive older man, at a movie theatre in Toronto. They become lovers, meeting in seedy hotels. In an erotic trance, Clara does not care that he is married with four children, and a Catholic.

A letter to Clara from Frank's daughter reveals that Frank sees other women and has caused much unhappiness. The affair eventually ends, but Clara finds herself pregnant again. She does not reveal the pregnancy to Frank, has no regrets and decides to keep the baby, though she knows she will lose her teaching job. The final chapter, bringing the story up to the present, is written by her grown-up daughter after Clara's death.

The book was published in eight markets outside Canada and translated into five languages. It was a particular hit in Australia, where Mr. Wright was invited to the Melbourne book festival.

"Clara Callan nearly did him in," said his publisher Phyllis Bruce, now with Simon & Schuster. "He started it many times. He changed the point of view. He knew where he wanted to get to but wasn't sure how to get there. He did a lot of research about the 1930s, becoming an expert on railway timetables of that period, among other things."

After Clara Callan, Ms. Bruce reissued all his earlier books, some of which were no longer in print. Four more novels followed this creative peak. The last one, published in 2016, was Nightfall about an older couple who come together for companionship, not sex. About the book's captivating protagonist Odette, Mr. Wright told Canadian Living magazine: "I've always liked women. I found them more interesting to talk to than men … so it's not surprising that a number of my books have prominent female characters."

In his later life, he received honorary degrees from three universities – Trent, Brock and Ryerson – and in 2007, he was named a member of the Order of Canada.

Last November, Phyllis Wright died of esophageal cancer, a blow from which Mr. Wright did not recover. "I always thought he was writing for Phyllis; she was his muse," Ms. Bruce said.

In David Staines's view, he was one of Canada's greatest writers, whose oeuvre needs serious assessment: "There has been no doctoral thesis on him – yet."

Richard Wright leaves his sons, Christopher and Andrew; three siblings, Jim, Joyce and Bill; and five grandchildren.

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