Fruits of the Earth (44 page)

THE AUTHOR

FREDERICK PHILIP GROVE
was born Felix Paul Greve at Radomno in West Prussia (now a part of Poland) in 1879. Raised in Hamburg and educated at the University of Bonn and later at the University of Munich, he began his career as a poet and translator into German of many English and French writers, including Balzac, Flaubert, Gide, Swift, and Wilde. His first novel,
Fanny Essler
, appeared in 1905; his second,
Maurermeister Ihles Haus
(Mastermason Ihle's House), in the following year. He left Germany in 1909 for the United States.

In 1912, under the new name of Frederick Philip Grove, he began teaching school in Manitoba, and continued in that profession until 1924.

Grove's first book in English,
Over Prairie Trails
, is a sequence of seven sketches of his weekly trips through the Manitoba countryside. His first novel in English,
Settlers of the Marsh
, establishes the essentially tragic pattern of his fiction, the heroic pioneers who seek domestic and material happiness but seldom realize their goals.

Grove's autobiography,
In Search of Myself
, begins with a fictitious account of his early life in Europe and moves on to a largely accurate presentation of his life in Canada.

In 1929 Grove left Manitoba to accept a job with a publishing firm in Ottawa. In 1931 he settled on a farm near Simcoe, Ontario, where he spent the final years of his life.

Frederick Philip Grove died in Simcoe, Ontario, in 1948.

BY FREDERICK PHILIP GROVE

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

In Search of Myself (1946)

ESSAYS

It Needs to Be Said (1929)

FICTION

Settlers of the Marsh (1925)

A Search for America (1927)

Our Daily Bread (1928)

The Yoke of Life (1930)

Fruits of the Earth (1933)

Two Generations (1939)

The Master of the Mill (1944)

Consider Her Ways (1947)

Tales from the Margin (1971)

SKETCHES

Over Prairie Trails (1922)

The Turn of the Year (1923)

LETTERS

The Letters of Frederick Philip Grove [ed. Desmond Pacey] (1976)

Copyright © 1933 by J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd.

Afterword © 1989 by Rudy Wiebe.

First New Canadian Library edition published in 1965 by permission of Mrs. Frederick Philip Grove.

This New Canadian Library edition 2008.

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher–or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency–is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Grove, Frederick Philip, 1879–1948

Fruits of the earth / Frederick Philip Grove; with an afterword by Rudy Wiebe.

(New Canadian library)

Originally published: Toronto: Dent, 1933.

e
ISBN
: 978-0-7710-3644-6

I. Title. II. Series.

PS8513.R83F7 2008     C813'.52     C2007-906237-7

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation's Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

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