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Richard Wright looks the very picture of septuagenarian health this hot day in this smallish Southern Ontario city that he and wife Phyllis have called home since the mid-1970s. Tanned and trim, wearing a khaki polo shirt, black slippers and shorts that display a nice pair of smooth, articulated calves, the 70-year-old author is a walking advertisement for the benefits of, well … walking.

Which is what Wright does pretty much every afternoon, stepping out of the beige stucco house he's lived and worked in for almost 30 years to stroll four or five kilometres through the leafy streets of old St. Catharines. “If I'm writing, that walk sometimes helps to sort out problems,” he explains. “Even when I'm not writing, I find [it] tremendously relaxing.”

Wright's peripatetic activities may be curtailed somewhat in the next few weeks. His new novel, October, has just been published and this means weeks of interviews, readings, autograph sessions and receptions from Saint John to Victoria. It is, says Wright, “an anxious time.”

October is the 11th novel in a writing career stretching back to 1970, with the publication of his debut novel, The Weekend Man, under the moniker Richard B. Wright (the “B” is for Bruce – included in his byline at the behest of his then-U.S. publisher to distinguish the Canadian from African-American novelist Richard Wright). October, as precise, economical and simile-deprived as anything Wright has written, was named to the long list of the $40,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize in mid-September (the short list will be announced Tuesday), and has nudged its way onto a couple of bestseller lists. Still, “you never get over the anxiety of bringing a book to the public.”

Wright isn't complaining, mind you. Until 2001, he was what publishers call “the classic mid-list writer” – an author who writes book after book, often to critical acclaim but little commercial success or media fanfare, “until, finally, the publisher gives up on him or he gives up on himself.”

Wright's big commercial turnaround came in late 2001 with his ninth novel, Clara Callan, about a plucky, artistically inclined small-town Ontario teacher and her relationship with her younger, more glamorous sister. The novel went on to win both the Giller and the Governor-General's Award for fiction. Better still, it sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and so did Wright's next one, Adultery, albeit to a lesser extent. Factor in the revived fortunes of his back list and it's a pretty safe bet Wright has grossed at least $1-million in the last five years.

You would never know it by his lifestyle, though. The money hasn't been spent on fancy electronic equipment: In the early throes of writing, Wright prefers to hammer away on an IBM Selectric typewriter, then mark up the pages with a pencil or pen.

“A computer is good for people who have deadlines. … But the way I look at writing novels is, ‘What's the hurry?' A novel has to simmer; it has to marinate in your head.”

Wright personally situates his change in fortune not with Clara Callan, but with its predecessor, 1995's The Age of Longing .

Wright calls Longing “the book that restored my confidence. By the early 1990s I had published seven novels. But most were out of print. It was the low point in my writing life and I have to confess that I was feeling decidedly unconfident about going on. I'd had good reviews; I had a cadre of fans … but I wanted a little more acclaim.”

Wright claims he wrote Longing “strictly for myself … with no real expectation of it doing very much.” Years earlier, he'd written “a Stephen King kind of thing in seven or eight months of madness, because I needed the money.” However, his New York agent declined to represent it. “It's too well-written for the market,” he told Wright. “I have authors who write three or four of these in a year” – a comment, Wright recalls, “that completely demoralized me.”

Wright felt demoralized by the initial reception to The Age of Longing, too. “I knew it was a good book as I was writing it. But what I was worried about was that nobody would publish it. I was almost 60 years old and I was thinking, ‘Who was gonna take this guy?' ” The publisher of his previous novel, Sunset Manor, declined to make an offer while “a more top-of-the-line publisher sat on it for a long, long time” before also bowing out. Finally, his then-Toronto agent, Janet Turnbull, wife of U.S. novelist John Irving, brought the book to the attention of Phyllis Bruce, a well-regarded editor with HarperCollins Canada. “She got back to me within a week and said, ‘I want to publish this book.'”

Some have suggested that Wright's oeuvre essentially constitutes one long epic story or, perhaps more accurately, a series of stories about the various inhabitants of a town one might call Wrightville.

Wright mildly disagrees with the characterization, but “I'll leave that for people who want to bring an analytic or critical mindset to bear. I don't analyze much about what I write. I'm the storyteller. Let other people do the critical work.” At the same time, “there's no doubt a writer, probably without knowing it, writes about the same things all his life,” Wright agrees. “I think I have, for example, been obsessed with time, with the finitude of life … [with] a sense of the duration of our own time on the Earth. That's a part of living in the 20th and 21st centuries; it would not have been a medieval idea at all or one from the 18th century. It's part of being in a secular humanist culture.”

A Wright protagonist tends to be “a person who's slightly off-centre, an outsider looking in, a reflective person, an observant person. Those are usually the tellers of the tales I write.”

Certainly this is true of October, which is narrated by James Hillyer, a widowed Canadian professor of Victorian literature, now 74, who learns that his daughter, also an academic, has been diagnosed with cancer just as his wife had been 22 years previous. At the same time, Hillyer is invited by an irascible former acquaintance from his teenage years, also afflicted with cancer, to travel with him to Zurich to witness his medically induced suicide.

While there's nothing particularly autobiographical about the novel, its autumnal tone makes it unmistakably the work of one who in March this year marked “the old three score and 10 years” that Psalm 90 deems our Earthly duration. “You really can't ignore the fact that with the very best scenario, 10 years more of life is probably all you're going to get. And that's being optimistic,” Wright smiles. “Further, you have to expect that the quality of those 10 years may not be what it has been.

“I feel healthy and vigorous now,” he adds. “But let's face it, five years hence it could be a lot different.”

In the meantime, Wright expects he'll continue to write (“It's a vocation for me, a compulsion … I can't imagine not coming down to this studio and making things up”) and to reside in St. Catharines, 100 kilometres from the gossip and literary intrigues of Toronto. “I've always lived within my head. It's a kind of craziness, I suppose.”

One good thing about his fall tour is that it will “depopulate” his mind. “I can't start anything until the characters in the book I've just written have gotten out of my head,” he explains. “They're still dwelling in my consciousness. I see them too clearly. They're family in a way, and until I do enough readings from the book – until time itself passes and until they can be displaced and replaced by other people – I can't do anything. Except live with them.”

Richard B. Wright visits Ottawa on Oct. 14, Victoria Oct. 15, Calgary Oct. 18, the Vancouver International Writers Festival Oct. 19-21, Toronto's International Festival of Authors Oct. 24, and London, Ont., Oct. 29 and Hamilton Nov. 9.