George Fetherling

George Fetherling (born 1949, full name Douglas George Fetherling) is a Canadian poet, novelist, and cultural commentator. One of the most prolific figures in Canadian letters, he has written or edited more than fifty books, including a dozen volumes of poetry, four book-length fictions, and a two-volume memoir. He lives in Toronto and Vancouver.

Fetherling was born in West Virginia, in the United States, on January 1, 1949. He moved to Canada at age eighteen. He started in the Canadian literary industry in 1966 in Toronto, where he was the first employee of publisher House of Anansi. Born Douglas, Fetherling began publishing under his father's name, George, in 1999. He began writing for the book reviews section of the Vancouver Sun in 2000. He is the author of British Columbia literary figure George Woodcock's only biography.

A study of Fetherling's books George Fetherling and His Work, edited by Linda Rogers, features essays by W. H. New, George Elliott Clarke, Brian Busby and others.

Selected bibliography

Poetry

• My Experience in the War – 1970
• Our Man in Utopia – 1971
• Café Terminus – 1973
• Eleven Early Poems – 1973
• Achilles' Navel – 1974
• Subroutines – 1981
• Variorum: New Poems and Old, 1965-1985 – 1985
• Moving Towards the Vertical Horizon – 1986
• Rites of Alienation – 1988
• The Dreams of Ancient Peoples – 1990
• Selected Poems – 1994
• Madagascar – 2000
• Singer, An Elegy – 2004
• "The Sylvia Hotel Poems" - 2010
• "Plans Deranged by Time" - 2012

Fiction

• The File on Arthur Moss – 1994
• Jericho – 2005
• Tales of Two Cities – 2006
• "Walt Whitman's Secret" - 2010

Non-fiction

• The Five Lives of Ben Hecht – 1977
• Gold Diggers of 1929 – 1979
• The Blue Notebook: Reports on Canadian Culture – 1985
• The Crowded Darkness – 1988
• The Gold Crusades: A Social History of the Gold Rushes, 1849-1929 – 1988
• The Rise of the Canadian Newspaper – 1990
• A Little Bit of Thunder – 1993
• The Book of Assassins – 2001
• River of Gold: The Fraser and Cariboo Gold Rushes – 2008

Biography

• The Gentle Anarchist: A Life of George Woodcock – 1998

Memoir

• Notes from a Journal – 1987
• Travels By Night: A Memoir – 1994
• Way Down Deep in the Belly of the Beast: A Memoir – 1996
• "The Writing Life: Journals 1975 - 2005" - 2013

Travel writing

• Year of the Horse: A Journey through Russia and China – 1991
• The Other China: Journeys around Taiwan – 1995
• Running Away to Sea: Round the World on a Tramp Freighter – 1998
• Three Pagodas Pass: A Roundabout Journey to Burma – 2002
• One Russia, Two Chinas – 2004
• "Indochina Now and Then" - 2012

Anthologies edited

• A George Woodcock Reader – 1980
• Carl Sandburg at the Movies: A Poet in the Silent Era 1920-1927 – 1985 (with Dale Fetherling)
• Documents in Canadian Art – 1987
• Documents in Canadian Film – 1988
• The Broadview Book of Canadian Anecdotes – 1988
• Best Canadian Essays 1989 – 1989
• Best Canadian Essays 1990 – 1990
• The Vintage Book of Canadian Memoirs – 2001

External links

• George Fetherling's entry in The Canadian Encyclopedia
• George Fetherling at Geist.com