Fonds uofa-2637 - Wilfred Watson fonds

Wilfred Watson was born in England in 1911 and immigrated to Canada with his family at the age of fifteen, settling in Duncan, British Columbia. Watson earned a B.A. in English literature from the University of British Columbia (1943); served with the Canadian navy during the Second World War; and continued his education after the war at the University of Toronto (receiving an M.A. in 1946 and a Ph.D. in 1951). In 1949, Watson was employed as a special lecturer in English at the University of British Columbia and from 1951 to 1953 he became professor in the Department of English at the University of Alberta, teaching at the Calgary campus. In 1954, he transferred to the Edmonton campus, remaining there as Professor of English until his retirement in 1977. Wilfred Watson married Sheila Martin Doherty in 1941, who as Sheila Watson published The Double Hook in 1959. Watson co-founded the jazz club "Yardbird Suite" in Edmonton in the early 1960's, and joined the editorial group of White Pelican (a quarterly review of the arts) in 1972. Watson's writing career was prolific and continuously evolving. His first volume of poetry, Friday's Child was published in 1955 and Watson received the 1955 Governor General's award for it. Watson studied in Paris for a year (1955-56) and in the early 1960's made contact with Marshall McLuhan and developed a growing interest in McLuhan's theories, culminating with their collaboration on the study From Cliché to Archetype. Wilfred Watson wrote several plays through the 1960's; many of them performed in association with the Studio Theatre at the University of Alberta. During the 1970's, Watson concentrated on writing poetry and he introduced his Number-grid verse, an experimentation using different typefaces and repetitions that combines numerals and words juxtaposed on the page. A major play trilogy, Gramsci x 3 was produced by Studio Theatre in 1986. Wilfred and Sheila Watson retired to Nanaimo, B.C. in 1980 and both passed away there in 1998.