David Adams Richards
Biography
David Adams Richards was born in 1950 and grew up in in Newcastle, New Brunswick, on the shores of the Miramichi River. As an undergraduate, strongly influenced by nineteenth-century novelists like Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Hardy, and Emily Bronte, Richards started to participate in readings at the Ice House, a Fredericton poetry workshop. There he was encouraged by Alden Nowlan, Bill Bauer and others to keep writing. In 1973, at the age of 23, he published his first novel, The Coming of Winter (1974), and has followed it up with ten more, including the Governor-General’s-Award-winning Nights Below Station Street (1988), the Giller Prize winner Mercy Among the Children (2000), The Bay of Love and Sorrows (1998), plus a short story collection and various non-fictional works, one of which, Lines on the Water (1998), also won a Governor-General’s Award. In the 1980s, Richards moved from the Miramichi to Fredericton, where he was writer-in-residence at UNB, and then to Saint John. From the early 1990s on, he lived for many years in Toronto, before returning to the Maritimes.
Bibliography
- Small Heroics. New Brunswick Chapbooks No. 17. Fredericton: New Brunswick Chapbooks, 1972.
- The Coming of Winter. Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1974.
- Blood Ties. Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1976.
- Dancers at Night: Stories. Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1978.
- Lives of Short Duration. Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1981.
- Road to the Stilt House. Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1985.
- Nights Below Station Street. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1988.
- Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990.
- For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1993.
- A Lad from Brantford and Other Essays. Fredericton: Broken Jaw Press, 1994.
- Hope in the Desperate Hour. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1996.
- Hockey Dreams: Memories of a Man Who Couldn't Play. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1997.
- The Bay of Love and Sorrows. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1998.
- Lines on the Water: A Fisherman's Life on the Miramichi. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1998.
- Mercy Among the Children. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2000.
- River of the Brokenhearted. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2003.
- The Friends of Meager Fortune. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2006.
- The Lost Highway. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2007.
- God Is: My Search for Faith in a Secular World. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2009.
- Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2011.
- Facing the Hunter: Reflections on a Misunderstood Way of Life. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2011.
- Crimes Against My Brother. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2014.
Critical Sources
- Armstrong, Christopher, and Herb Wyile. "Firing the Regional Can(n)on: Liberal Pluralism, Social Agency, and David Adams Richards's Miramichi Trilogy." Studies in Canadian Literature/Etudes en Littérature Canadienne 22.1 (1997): 1-18.
- Byrne, George. "The Blood Hardened and the Blood Running: The Character of Orville in Blood Ties." Studies in Canadian Literature/Etudes en Littérature Canadienne 7.1 (1982): 55-62.
- Connor, H. W. "A Note on George Byrne's Argument that Orville is the Central Character in Blood Ties." Studies in Canadian Literature/Etudes en Littérature Canadienne 8.1 (1983): 142-8.
- "Coming of Winter, Coming of Age: The Autumnal Vision of David Adams Richard's First Novel." Studies in Canadian Literature/Etudes en Littérature Canadienne 9.1 (1984): 31-40.
- Connor, H. w. "The River in the Blood: Escape and Entrapment in the Fiction of David Adams Richards." World Literature Written in English 26.2 (1986): 269-77.
- "The Unlikely Heroes of David Adams Richards's Second Trilogy." International Fiction Review 25, no. 1-2 (1998): 71-7.
- Currie, Sheldon. "David Adams Richards: The People on the Roadway." Antigonish Review 99 (1994): 67-75.
- Davey, Frank. "Discourse and Determinism in Nights Below Station Street." Open Letter 6 (1989): 17-26.
- Lever, Susan. "Against the Stream: The Fiction of David Adams Richards." Australian-Canadian Studies: A Journal for the Humanities & Social Sciences 12.1 (1994): 81-9.
- "An Interview with David Adams Richards." Australian-Canadian Studies: A Journal for the Humanities & Social Sciences 12.1 (1994): 91-7.
- Lord, Marie-Linda. "Cet Autre Est Aussi Un Minoritaire: Lecture Comparée Du Rapport d'Altérité Entre Acadiens Et Irlandais Chez Antonine Maillet Et David Adams Richards." Francophonies d'Amérique 10 (2000): 127-35.
- "Territorialité Et Identité Dans l'Oeuvre Romanesque d'Antonine Maillet Et De David Adams Richards." Francophonies d'Amérique 14 (2002): 117-30.
- Lousley, Cheryl. “Knowledge, Power and Place: Environmental Politics in the Fiction of Matt Cohen and David Adams Richards. Canadian Literature 195 (2007): 11-30.
- MacDonald, Frances. "War of the Worlds: David Adams Richards and Modern Times." Antigonish Review 104 (1996): 17-24.
- Mathews, Lawrence. "David Adams Richards (1950- )." Canadian Writers and their Works. Ed. Robert Lecker, et al. Toronto: ECW, 1995. 185-254.
- Proctor, Craig. "Non-Judgmental Truth: An Interview with David Adams Richards." B&A: New Fiction 29 (1998): 40-4.
- Richards, David Adams. "My Miramichi Trilogy: A Practising Novelist's View of the Novel in New Brunswick." Literature of Region and Nation: Proceedings of the 6th International Literature of Region and Nation Conference, 2-7 August 1996. Ed. Winnifred M. Bogaards. Saint John: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, with University of New Brunswick in Saint John, 1998.
- Robinson, Jack. "Re-reading David Adams Richards: Ironies of Allegory in Mercy Among the Children." Studies in Canadian Literature 36.2 (2011): 143-64.
- Scherf, Kathleen. "David Adams Richards' Blood Ties: Essentially Women." Room of One's Own: A Feminist Journal of Literature and Criticism 14.4 (1991): 23-39.
- "David Adams Richards: 'He must be a Social Realist Regionalist'." Studies in Canadian Literature/Etudes en Littérature Canadienne 15.1 (1990): 154- 70.
- Tremblay, Tony. "An Introduction to the Work of David Adams Richards." Antigonish Review 141/142 (2005): 9-10.
- "Answering the Critics: David Adams Richards and the Paradox of Unpopularity." Antigonish Review 128 (2002): 119-28.
- "David Adams Richards." Brick: A Literary Journal 51 (1995): 30-2.
- "David Adams Richards: Canada's 'Independent' Intellectual." Twayne Companion to Contemporary Literature in English. Ed. R. H. W. Dillard and Amanda Cockrell. New York, NY: Twayne; Thomson Gale, 2002.
- "David Adams Richards: Canada's 'Independent' Intellectual." Hollins Critic 36.4 (1999): 1-14.
- ed. David Adams Richards: Essays on His Works. Toronto, ON: Guernica, 2005.
- David Adams Richards of the Miramichi. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010.
- Williams, Jocelyn. "The Rifle Kicks Hard Both Ways: Rereading David Adams Richards' For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down." The Nashwaak Review 16/17.1 (2006): 46-66.
- Wyile, Herb. "Taking the Real Home to Read." Open Letter 6 (1989): 5-15.
See also: - David Creelman, Setting in the East: Maritime Realist Fiction (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003) 146-172.
- Tremblay, Tony. "'Lest on too close sight I miss the darling illusion': The Politics of the Center in 'Reading Maritime'." Studies in Canadian Literature 33.2 (2008): 23-39.