Frederick Philip Grove
- Writer
Grove was a prolific writer, publishing over 20 novels, as well as short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. His best-known works are the prairie novels Our Daily Bread (1928), The Yoke of Life (1930), and Fruits of the Earth (1933). These novels explore the lives of settlers on the Canadian prairies, and are considered to be some of the most important works of Canadian literature. His first novel, Settlers of the Marsh (1925), a story of love, murder, and redemption on the Manitoba Prairie (a thinly veiled account of Grove's own affair in Kentucky in 1911 with Else Ploetz, later Baroness von Freytag- Loringhoven), was critically praised but commercially unsuccessful. It was followed in 1927 by the partly autobiographical and partly allegorical novel A Search for America, the story of a young European immigrant's settlement in Canada, which earned him both critical acclaim and some prosperity. His later novels, essays, and partly fictional autobiography, In Search of Myself (1946), failed to achieve the popular success of A Search for America. Grove's autobiographical work, now questioned as to factual reliability, comprises A Search for America (1927) and In Search of Myself (1946).