Chapter One - An Accidental Career

In November 1948 a tall, gangly young man reported for duty at the CBC building – “the old Kremlin” – the gabled brick Victorian pile at 354 Jarvis Street in downtown Toronto. A recent graduate in Honours English and Philosophy at the University of Toronto, he had intended to be a magazine writer, or a critic, or perhaps to work in publishing. He stumbled into his position as a program organizer in the Talks and Public Affairs Department of the CBC, stipulating at the time of his employment that his work some way involve literatures. As a result, he was put in charge of a rather innocuous fifteen-minute weekly slot of readings called Canadian Short Stories….

A series of coincidences – he calls them “accidents” – led to the career of Robert Weaver who, from a sequence of modest beginnings nearly sixty years ago, became the catalyst and facilitator of the flowering of contemporary Canadian literature…[,] godfather and muse to three generations of Canadian writers.