Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
2006
Abstract
Long admired by academics and fellow writers for his finely wrought portraits of small-town prairie life in Canada between the wars, and of the restless, complex, desiring souls contained within and by this landscape, Sinclair Ross was an intensely private man who nevertheless craved a wider popular audience for his work. It is thus somewhat ironic that his greatest public notoriety should have come as a result of his posthumous outing by Keath Fraser in As for Me and My Body (1997), a memoir documenting Fraser's twenty-seven-year friendship with the author that was affectionately written but rather salaciously reviewed. Even this news was more rapaciously received by the growing coterie of Ross scholars than by the general public, providing as it did a wave of newly minted Canadian queer theorists (myself included) with the confirmation they needed in disclosing the veiled operations of subversive sexuality in Ross's fiction. It is to David Stouck's credit, in this meticulously researched biography, that he neither shies away from nor overplays Ross's sexual identity, pointing out, through a close reading of the author's texts rather than a cataloguing of his tricks (although there is some of this), that Ross's bisexuality finds fictional expression in the triangulated relationships that recur throughout his best-known works.
Comments
Published in GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY 26:4 (Fall 2006). Copyright © 2006 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.