Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Email
Answers.com

Mordecai Richler

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Mordecai Richler
Home > Library > Miscellaneous > Britannica Concise Encyclopedia

(born Jan. 27, 1931, Montreal, Que., Can. — died July 3, 2001, Montreal) Canadian novelist. He grew up in a Jewish working-class neighbourhood in which many of his novels are set. In 1951 – 52 he lived in Paris, where he was influenced by existentialism; he later lived in England. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959) is a bawdy account of a Jewish boy in Montreal and his transformation into a ruthless businessman. His later novels include Joshua Then and Now (1980) and Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989). He also wrote children's books featuring the character Jacob Two-Two.

For more information on Mordecai Richler, visit Britannica.com.

Search unanswered questions...

Enter a question here...
Search: All sources Community Q&A Reference topics

Biography: Mordecai Richler
Top
Home > Library > Miscellaneous > Biographies

One of Canada's most accomplished writers, Mordecai Richler (1931-2001) produced screenplays, novels, children's literature, and essays. At the time of his death, he was acknowledged as Canada's leading curmudgeon for his witty insights on topics such as the Canadian personality and the foibles of Quebec separatism.

Mordecai Richler was a prominent figure on the Canadian literary landscape for more than 40 years after the 1959 publication of his breakthrough novel, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Richler was much more than just a popular novelist, however; as a prolific contributor to magazines, movies, and children's literature, Richler probably reached a broader audience than any contemporary Canadian writer. His blunt words on Canadian political affairs also made Richler a household name throughout the country, particularly for his unsparing criticism of the ongoing battles over Quebec sovereignty. His description of the conflict as "Canada's longest running opera bouffe, a far from life-and-death struggle over the size of English lettering and outdoor commercial signs in Montreal," in a 1999 Stanley Knowles Lecture at the University of Waterloo was just a sampling of Richler's disdain for the separatist forces in his native province.

St. Urbain Street Childhood

Richler's grandfather, a rabbinical scholar, emigrated to Montreal in 1904 from Galicia, a region then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and today split between Poland and the Ukraine. Establishing a scrapyard, the elder Richler gradually built the concern into a successful business that employed some of his fourteen children. Moses Isaac Richler, the eldest of the Richler sons, followed his father into the family business; however, unlike his younger brother, Solly, he was never made a full partner. Moses Richler's failure to achieve as much as his siblings was later explored in the writings of his son, Mordecai Richler, who was born on January 27, 1931.

A family of devout Orthodox Jews, the Richlers lived in the Jewish enclave in Montreal centered around St. Urbain Street; at one time, three generations of the family lived across the street from one another. Richler later immortalized the area in his novel St. Urbain's Horseman as a lively, nurturing place despite the economic hardships that many of the residents faced. At home, however, the young Richler was witness to his parents' increasingly unhappy marriage, which he attributed to his father's passive nature. In 1943, his mother, Lily Richler, had the marriage annulled on the grounds that she had been an underage bride and had married without her parents' consent; although Richler and his older brother were then adolescents, the annulment was granted.

Richler was encouraged in his religious studies at a Jewish parochial school; his parents hoped that he might become a rabbi. After entering Baron Byng High School, however, Richler began to develop a more secular identity. Even though Richler's Jewish roots remained central to his identity for the rest of his life, he abandoned most of the Orthodox practices that he had been taught. His greatest rebellion, however, occurred when he abandoned his course work at Sir George Williams College (today known as Concordia University) after his second year. Richler was uninspired by his studies and longed to break free of his provincial life and pursue a career as a writer.

Expatriate Writer

In 1949, after a brief stint on the staff of the Montreal Herald, Richler began traveling in Europe and eventually spent an extended time in Paris, where he published his first piece of fiction, "Shades of Darkness (Three Impressions)" in the literary magazine Points. Encouraged by this early success, Richler also worked on the manuscript for a novel, The Acrobats, about a wandering Canadian idealist inspired by the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War.

With his pockets empty, Richler returned to Montreal in 1951 while his first manuscript made the rounds of several European publishing houses. He worked as both a salesman and as a radio editor for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation while he revised The Acrobats following its conditional acceptance by a British publisher. In 1954, the book finally was published. It received fairly good reviews, but sold only about 900 copies in its first few years in print in Canada. As Richler recalled in his debut essay in 1958 (reprinted in commemoration of his death in 2001) in Maclean's, a Canadian news magazine, "My last royalty statement from New York cost me a good deal of sleep. It covered the last six months in 1956, and in that period two copies of The Acrobats had been sold. One domestic and the other Orient. For nights, I was kept awake thinking, 'Who in the hell do I know in the Orient? Would it be possible to trace the buyer? Shouldn't we correspond? Or did he, perhaps, buy the book in error?"'

Richler returned to Europe to take up life as an expatriate writer in London. An early marriage ended in divorce, but his second marriage in 1960, to onetime couture fashion model Florence Wood, lasted until his death; they had three sons and two daughters.

After two more novels that received fairly positive critical notices, yet disappointing sales figures - Son of a Smaller Hero in 1955 and A Choice of Enemies in 1957 - Richler published a breakthrough work, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, in 1959. Set in Montreal, the novel explored the rise of an ambitious young Jewish man determined to be successful; praised by critics, the book eventually became part of the modern canon of Canadian literature. Richler also established his reputation as a screenwriter for television and film during this period; perhaps his best-known early contribution was his uncredited work on the classic British film on class conflict, Room at the Top and his acknowledged work on its sequel, Life at the Top.

Demonstrating his versatility as a novelist, Richler published two works of humorous fiction, The Incomparable Atuk (distributed in the United States as Stick Your Neck Out) in 1963 and Cocksure in 1968. Both works used fish-out-of-water protagonists to illuminate larger observations about contemporary society, particularly the pretensions of the academic and artistic elites. Together with a collection of essays, Hunting Tigers Under Glass, Cocksure received the Governor General's Award in 1968, one of the highest honors bestowed by the Canadian government. Richler continued his string of successes with the 1971 publication of St. Urbain's Horsemen, which again received the Governor General's Award. A novel that included more autobiographical elements than any of his other fictional works, St. Urbain's Horsemen followed the life of an expatriate Canadian living in London as he made sense of his life in middle age.

Canada's Leading Curmudgeon

In 1972, Richler returned to Montreal with his family. He remained a resident of the city - which he claimed was the most culturally sophisticated in Canada - for the rest of his life. Over the next decade, his output as a writer remained as varied as ever. In addition to various projects for television, Richler wrote the screenplay for the movie adaptation of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, which earned him an Academy Award nomination in 1975. That year, Richler also published a novel for children, Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang, about the travails of a young boy who had to repeat everything he said twice for adults to understand him. The novel won the first Ruth Schwartz Children's Book Award in 1976.

In 1980, Richler reemerged as a novelist with the publication of Joshua Then and Now. Another work that incorporated some autobiographical elements, the novel explored the life of a Jewish-Canadian writer coming to terms with the past; the book was made into a film in 1985, with Richler as screenwriter. In 1990, Richler touched off controversy when he published Solomon Gursky Was Here, a novel inspired by the real-life history of Canada's Bronfman family. The country's wealthiest family, the Bronfmans made their fortune from their Seagram's Whiskey business and later built a wide-ranging entertainment empire including large holdings in Universal Studios and Time-Warner; one member of the family, Edgar Bronfman, also served as the head of the Jewish World Congress. Richler's last novel, Barney's Version, appeared in 1998.

Although he enjoyed uninterrupted success after The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Richler became far better known as a humorist and social commentator in the last decade of his career. In addition to his regular essays in Maclean's, Richler published humorous and nostalgic pieces in magazines and journals ranging from Playboy to Atlantic to the New York Times Book Review. A lengthy piece he published in the New Yorker, however, gained Richler the most attention with its examination of the attempts to restrict the use of the English language in public places in Quebec. Richler eventually published an entire book devoted to the subject of Quebec separatism, Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! Requiem for a Divided Country, in 1992. Richler's defiance of Quebec separatist demands made him a reviled figure in some quarters, and death threats were made against him after the book was published. Richler fought the separatists with satire and humor. As he told an audience at the University of Waterloo in 1999, "I manned the barricades, so to speak, for the legal right to munch unilingually labeled kosher matzos in Quebec for more than sixty days a year. I also protested the right of a pet shop parrot to be unilingually English. As a consequence, nice people still stop me on the street and thank me for taking a stand. It's embarrassing, for my stand, such as it is, hardly qualifies me as a latter-day Spartacus or Tom Paine or Rosa Luxemburg."

In declining health for some time, perhaps due to his favored pastimes of drinking malt whiskey and smoking, Richler had his kidney removed in a 1998 operation. A recurrence of cancer led to more treatment, but Richler died on July 3, 2001. He was one of the most respected literary figures in Canada by the time of his death.

Colleagues and friends memorialized Richler as a writer who was not overawed by his own success. His readers mourned the loss of one of the first internationally renowned Canadian writers. Indeed, Richler's ability to describe the Canadian perspective was one of his greatest contributions to the country's culture. Speaking at the University of Waterloo in 1999, he said: "One of our most attractive qualities, I think, is that we are a self-deprecating people. Had Babe Ruth, for instance, been born a Canadian rather than an American, he would not be celebrated as the Sultan of Swat, the man who hit 714 home runs. Instead he would be deprecated as that notorious flunk who struck out 1330 times."

Books

Richler, Mordecai, Home Sweet Home: My Canadian Album, Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.

Richler, Mordecai, Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! Requiem for a Divided Country, Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.

Periodicals

Maclean's, July 16, 2001.

Toronto Star, July 5, 2001.

Online

"The Apprenticeship of Mordecai Richler," CBC News,http://www.cbc.ca/news/indepth/richler/ (October 24, 2001).

"Canadian Conundrums," University of Waterloo,http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/ECON/needhdata/richler.html (October 24, 2001).

"Mordecai Richler," Internet Movie Database,http://us.imdb.com/Name?Richler,+Mordecai (October 24, 2001).

"Mordecai Richler Biocritical Essay," University of Calgary Library,http://www.ucalgary.ca/library/SpecColl/richlerbioc.htm (October 24, 2001).

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Mordecai Richler
Top
Home > Library > Miscellaneous > Columbia Encyclopedia - People
Richler, Mordecai, 1931-2001, Canadian novelist, b. Montreal. He fled his native city in the early 1950s and lived mainly in London, returning to Canada in 1972 and from then on spending part of his year in London and part in Montreal. Reflecting his youth in that city, Richler's novels are often set within the Canadian Jewish community. Typically, his works skewer provincialism, combining fantastic and wildly comic elements with realistic themes and mingling street-smart sarcasm and ribald wit. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959, film 1974), his best-known work, chronicles the ascent to wealth of a poor and fiercely ambitious Jewish youth. His other works include The Acrobats (1954), Cocksure (1968), St. Urbain's Horseman (1971), Joshua Then and Now (1980), Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989), and Barney's Version (1997).

Richler also wrote numerous screenplays, including No Love for Johnnie (1959) and movie versions of his own works. A number of his essays were collected in Notes on an Endangered Species (1974); This Year in Jerusalem (1994) discusses his personal reactions and relationship to Israel. Richler also was a spokesman for the English-speaking population of Quebec, strongly opposing the separatist movement; this position was reflected in his Oh Canada, Oh Quebec (1992). He also wrote several children's books. Winning all of his native country's important literary awards, Richler succeeded in being both an enormously successful icon of Canadian culture and one of its most influential critics.

Bibliography

See studies by G. Woodcock (1970), G. D. Sheps, ed. (1971), A. E. Davidson (1983), V. J. Ramraj (1983), M. Darling, ed. (1986), and R. F. Brenner (1989).

Quotes By: Mordecai Richler
Top
Home > Library > Literature & Language > Quotes By

Quotes:

"Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates."

Writer: Mordecai Richler
Top
Home > Library > Entertainment & Arts > Actors
  • Born: Jan 27, 1931 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada
  • Died: Jul 03, 2001 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada
  • Occupation: Writer, Actor
  • Active: '60s-'80s
  • Major Genres: Comedy Drama, Children's/Family
  • Career Highlights: Joshua Then and Now, Fun with Dick and Jane, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
  • First Major Screen Credit: No Love for Johnnie (1960)

Biography

Rising to fame with yarns spun around his childhood in Montreal's Jewish community in the 1940s, Canadian curmudgeon Mordecai Richler would go on to become a seminal figure in contemporary literature with such classic works as The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Solomon Gursky Was Here.

Moving to London, England, in 1954 for 20 years, Richler continued writing until later moving back to his homeland and settling in Quebec in 1972. With such works as Barney's Version, Richler won numerous awards, including the Commonwealth Writer's Prize and two Governor General's literary awards. Richler's contributions to film included his screenplay adaptations of Kravitz and Joshua Then and Now, as well as screenplays for Fun With Dick and Jane (1977), Life at the Top (1965), and Room at the Top (1959). Diagnosed with cancer later in life, Richler died of complications resulting from treatment in his hometown of Montreal in July of 2001. He was 70. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
Wikipedia: Mordecai Richler
Top
Home > Library > Miscellaneous > Wikipedia

Mordecai Richler, CC (January 27, 1931 – July 3, 2001) was a Canadian author, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and essayist. A leading critic called him "the great shining star of his Canadian literary generation" and a pivotal figure in the country's history.[1] His best known works are The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Barney's Version, and the Jacob Two-Two children's stories. Richler's uncompromising opinions on contemporary Canada easily matched, and sometimes exceeded, the satirical sting of his fiction.

Contents

Early years and travel

The son of a scrapyard dealer, Richler was born and raised on St. Urbain Street in the Mile End area of Montreal, Quebec, a neighbourhood he would later immortalize in his novels. He graduated from Baron Byng High School. Richler then enrolled in Sir George Williams College (now Concordia University) to study English but dropped out before completing his degree. He moved to Paris, France at age nineteen, intent on following in the footsteps of a previous generation of literary exiles, the so-called Lost Generation of the 1920s. Richler returned to Montreal in 1952, working briefly at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, then moved to London, England in 1954. Worrying "about being so long away from the roots of my discontent", he returned to Montreal in 1972, but continued to spend part of each year in London.

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

Richler's career took off with the publication of his fourth novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz in 1959. The book featured a frequent Richler theme: Jewish life in the 1930s and 40s in the neighbourhood of Montreal east of Mount Royal Park on and about St. Urbain Street and the Main (Boul. St. Laurent). Richler wrote poignantly of the neighbourhood and its people, chronicling the hardships and disabilities they faced as a Jewish minority.

To a middle-class stranger, it is true, one street would have seemed as squalid as the next. On each corner a cigar store, a grocery, and a fruit man. Outside staircases everywhere. Winding ones, wooden ones, rusty and risky ones. Here a prized lot of grass splendidly barbered, there a spitefully weedy patch. An endless repetition of precious peeling balconies and waste lots making the occasional gap here and there.[2]

The 1974 movie version was directed by Richler's friend Ted Kotcheff and starred Richard Dreyfuss in his first leading role. Richler and Lionel Chetwynd co-wrote the screenplay.

Richler as commentator

Throughout his career, Richler wrote acerbic journalistic commentary and delighted in the role of contrarian provocateur. He was an iconoclast with little tolerance for pretense or pomposity. In a characteristic putdown, Richler called Canadian film entrepreneurs "snivelling little greasers on the make."[citation needed] Richler contributed to The Atlantic Monthly, Look, and The New Yorker. In his later years, Richler was a newspaper columnist for The National Post and Montreal's The Gazette. He was often critical of Quebec and Canadian nationalism. Another favorite Richler target was the government-subsidized Canadian literary movement of the 1970s and 80s. Richler was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 2001, just a few months before his death.

Proponents and critics

Many critics distinguished between Richler the author and Richler the polemicist. Richler frequently said in interviews that his goal was to be an honest witness to his time and place, and to write at least one book that would be read after his death. His work was championed by journalists Robert Fulford and Peter Gzowski, among others. Admirers praised Richler for daring to tell uncomfortable truths, and he has been described in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature as "one of the foremost writers of his generation".[3] A 2004 oral biography by Michael Posner was entitled The Last Honest Man.

Detractors called Richler's satire heavy-handed[citation needed] and noted his propensity for recycling material, incorporating elements of his journalism into later novels.[1] Some critics thought Richler more adept at sketching striking scenes than crafting coherent narratives.[citation needed] Richler's ambivalent relationship with Montreal's Jewish community was captured in Mordecai and Me, a book by Joel Yanofsky published in 2003.

Richler's most frequent conflicts were with the Jewish community,[4] English Canadian nationalists, and Quebec nationalists.[5]

Richler's long-running dispute with Quebec nationalists was fuelled by magazine articles he wrote in American publications between the late 1970s and mid 1990s. The articles criticized Quebec's language laws, and separatism. Critics took particular exception to Richler's allegations of anti-semitism.[6]

In The Atlantic Monthly, around the time of the first election of the Parti Québécois (PQ) in 1976, Richler linked the PQ to Nazism, by asserting that the theme song of the 1976 PQ campaign "À partir d'aujourd'hui, demain nous appartient" was a Nazi song, "Tomorrow belongs to me..." the chilling Hitler Youth song from Cabaret.[7] Neither the remainder of the text, nor the music, are related. Furthermore, the Cabaret song, never sung in Nazi Germany, was written in the 1960s by John Kander, a Jewish American lyricist and composer, not German fascists. "À partir d'aujourd'hui" was written by well-known songwriter Stéphane Venne when he was asked to compose a song for an advertisement of the Caisses populaires Desjardins credit union. In Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!, Richler acknowledges the error, blaming himself for having "cribbed" the information from an article by Irwin Cotler and Ruth Wisse for the Jewish American magazine Commentary.[8] Co-writer of the Commentary article Cotler eventually issued a written apology to Lévesque. Richler also apologized for the incident and called it an "embarrassing gaffe".[9]

His views were strongly criticized by some in Quebec and to some degree among Anglophone Canadians.[10] His detractors maintained that Richler had an outdated and stereotyped view of Quebec society, and that he risked polarizing relations between French and English. After the publication of Oh Canada! Oh Quebec, Pierrette Venne, a future Bloc Québécois MP called for the book to be banned.[11] Daniel Latouche compared the book to Mein Kampf.[12] Nadia Khouri believes that there was a racist undertone in some of the reaction to Richler, emphasizing that he was not "one of us"[13] or that he was not a "real Quebecer"[14] Additionally some passages were deliberately misquoted; a section in which he said that Quebec women were treated like "sows" was misinterpreted to suggest that Richler thought they were sows.[15] Other French writers also thought there had been an overreaction, including Jean-Hugues Roy, Étienne Gignac, Serge-Henri Vicière, and Dorval Brunelle. His defenders asserted that Mordecai Richler may have been wrong on certain specific points, but was certainly not racist or anti-Québécois.[16] Richler had always attacked nationalists, including English Canadians, Israelis and Zionists.[citation needed] Some Quebecers acclaimed Richler for his courage and for attacking the orthodoxies of Quebec society,[17] and he has been described as "the most prominent defender of the rights of Quebec's anglophones."[18]

The reaction to Richler's book itself raised concerns for some commentators[19] about the persistence of antisemitism among sections of the Quebec population. He received death threats, including a threat to blow up the hospital in which he was staying, and letters with swastikas drawn on them;[20] a Francophone journalist yelled at one of his sons that "if your father was here, I'd make him relive the holocaust right now!", while an editorial cartoon in the French press compared him to Hitler.[21] The criticism that he wrote his essay on Quebec for money was seen as evoking old stereotypes of Jews, and the demands made for leaders of the Jewish community to dissociate themselves from Richler were seen as indicating that Richler, although born in Quebec and for a time married to a French-Canadian, was "not part of the tribe" because he was anglo and Jewish.[22]

Following Jacques Parizeau's comment on the day of the 1995 referendum, where the latter attributed the loss to "money and the ethnic vote", Richler created the "Impure Wool Society" which granted the "Prix Parizeau" to a distinguished non-Francophone writer of Quebec. The group's name plays on the expression "québécois pure laine", typically used to refer to Québécois with extensive French-Canadian ancestry. The prize (with an award of $3000) was granted twice: Benet Davetian in 1996 for The Seventh Circle, and David Manicom in 1997 for Ice In Dark Water.[23]

Animator Caroline Leaf created an Academy Award-nominated animation in 1976 titled The Street, based on Richler's 1969 short story of the same name.

Family life

Richler divorced Catherine Boudreault to marry his second wife, Florence. He adopted her son Daniel. The couple had five children, including:

  • Daniel Richler - A longstanding figure in Canadian media and broadcasting, Daniel Richler has written a semi-autobiographical novel, Kicking Tomorrow (1991). The protagonist's father bears many similarities to Mordecai Richler.
  • Emma Richler - author of a collection of linked short stories Sister Crazy (2001), which features a father modeled on her own. A novel, Feed My Dear Dogs was published in 2005.
  • Jacob Richler - an author and columnist.
  • Noah Richler - a journalist, radio producer and host, and author of This Is My Country, What's Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada (2006).
  • Martha Richler - a cartoonist who published a daily cartoon, most recently, in London's Evening Standard, using the pen-name "Marf". Her cartoons are in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and the Charles Saatchi Collection. She also wrote the companion guide to Washington's National Gallery of Art, A World of Art.

Leah Rosenberg, Richler's mother, published an autobiography, The Errand Runner: Memoirs of a Rabbi's Daughter (1981), which discusses Mordecai's birth and upbringing.

Awards and recognition

  • 1969 Governor General's Award for Cocksure and Hunting Tigers Under Glass.
  • 1972 Governor General's Award for St. Urbain's Horseman.
  • 1974 Screenwriters Guild of America Award for Best Comedy for screenplay of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.
  • 1976 Canadian Library Association Book of the Year for Children Award: Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang.
  • 1976 Ruth Schwartz Children's Book Award for Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang.
  • 1990 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Solomon Gursky was Here
  • 1995 Mr. Christie's Book Award (for the best English book age 8 to 11) for Jacob Two-Two's First Spy Case.
  • 1997 The Giller Prize for Barney's Version.
  • 1998 Canadian Booksellers Associations "Author of the Year" award.
  • 1998 Stephen Leacock Award for Humour for Barney's Version
  • 1998 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (Canada & Caribbean region) for Barney's Version
  • 1998 The QSpell Award for Barney's Version.
  • 2000 Honorary Doctorate of Letters, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec.
  • 2001 Companion of the Order of Canada
  • 2004 Number 98 on the CBC's television show about great Canadians, The Greatest Canadian
  • 2004 Barney's Version was chosen for inclusion in Canada Reads 2004, championed by author Zsuzsi Gartner.
  • 2006 Cocksure was chosen for inclusion in Canada Reads 2006, championed by actor and author Scott Thompson
  • 2009 "Extraordinary Canadians: Mordecai Richler" is a book-length biography about Richler published by Penguin Canada and written by the acclaimed writer M.G. Vassanji.
  • "Barney's Version" was also adapted to radio by the CBC

Bibliography

Fiction

Fiction for children

  • Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang (1975)
  • Jacob Two-Two and the Dinosaur (1987)
  • Jacob Two-Two's First Spy Case (1995)

Travel

  • Images of Spain (1977)
  • This Year In Jerusalem (1994)

Essays

  • Hunting Tigers Under Glass: Essays and Reports (1968)
  • Shovelling Trouble (1972)
  • Notes on an Endangered Species and Others (1974)
  • The Great Comic Book Heroes and Other Essays (1978)
  • Home Sweet Home: My Canadian Album (1984)
  • Broadsides (1991)
  • Belling the Cat (1998)
  • Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! Requiem for a Divided Country (1992)
  • Dispatches from the Sporting Life (2002)

Nonfiction

  • On Snooker: The Game and the Characters Who Play It (2001)

Anthologies

  • Canadian Writing Today (1970)
  • The Best of Modern Humour (1986) (U.S. title: The Best of Modern Humor)
  • Writers on World War II - (1991)

Film scripts

See also

References

  1. ^ a b Mordecai Richler: an obituary tribute by Robert Fulford
  2. ^ The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Penguin Books, 1964, p. 13
  3. ^ Laurence Ricou, "Mordecai Richler", The Oxford Companion to Literature, 2d ed., 1997
  4. ^ Mordecai my pal., By: Rabinovitch, Jack. Maclean's, 24/6/2002, Vol. 115, Issue 25
  5. ^ "Mordecai Richler, 1931-2001." By: Mark Steyn. New Criterion, September 2001, Vol. 20 Issue 1, p123-128.
  6. ^ See, "Fighting words." By: Richler, Mordecai. New York Times Book Review, June 1, 1997, Vol. 146 Issue 50810, p8; "Tired of separatism." By: Richler, Mordecai. New York Times, October 31, 1994, Vol. 144 Issue 49866, pA19]; "O Quebec." By: Richler, Mordecai. New Yorker, May 30, 1994, Vol. 70 Issue 15, p50; "Gros Mac attack." By: Richler, Mordecai. New York Times Magazine, July 18, 93, Vol. 142 Issue 49396, p10; "Language Problems." By: Richler, Mordecai. Atlantic, Jun83, Vol. 251 Issue 6, p10, 8p; "OH! CANADA! Lament for a divided country." By: Richler, Mordecai. Atlantic Monthly (0004-6795), Dec1977, Vol. 240 Issue 6, p34;
  7. ^ "Controverse autour du livre Oh Canada Oh Québec!" video, Archives, Société Radio-Canada, March 31, 1992, retrieved September 22, 2006
  8. ^ "Faut arrêter de freaker" by Pierre Foglia, La Presse, December 16, 2000
  9. ^ Smith, Donald. D'une nation à l'autre: des deux solitudes à la cohabitation. Montreal: Éditions Alain Stanké, 1997. p. 56.
  10. ^ Smart, Pat. "Daring to Disagree with Mordecai" in Canadian Forum May 1992, p.8.
  11. ^ Johnson, William. "Oh, Mordecai. Oh, Quebec." The Globe and Mail July 7, 2001.
  12. ^ "Le Grand Silence", Le Devoir, March 28, 1992.
  13. ^ "Richler, Trudeau, Lasagne et les autres", October 22, 1991. Le Devoir
  14. ^ Sarah Scott, Geoff Baker, "Richler Doesn't Know Quebec, Belanger Says; Writer 'Doesn't Belong', Chairman of Panel on Quebec's Future Insists", The Gazette, 20 September 1991.
  15. ^ Khouri, Nadia. Qui a peur de Mordecai Richler. Montréal: Éditions Balzac, 1995.
  16. ^ "Hitting below the belt.", By: Barbara Amiel, Maclean's, 13/8/2001, Vol. 114, Issue 33
  17. ^ Khouri, Nadia. Qui a peur de Mordecai Richler. Montréal: Éditions Balzac, 1995
  18. ^ Ricou, above
  19. ^ Khouri, above, Scott et al., above, Delisle cited in Kraft, below
  20. ^ Noah Richler, "A Just Campaign", The New York Times, October 7, 2001, p. AR4
  21. ^ Michel Vastel, "Le cas Richler". L'actualité, November 1, 1996, p.66
  22. ^ Frances Kraft, "Esther Delisle", The Canadian Jewish News, April 1, 1993, p. 6
  23. ^ Siemens: Canadian Literary Awards and Prizes, from The Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada
v • d • e
Scotiabank Giller Prize
v • d • e
Commonwealth Writers' Prize — Best Book Winners
1987–1990

Olive Senior (1987) · Festus Iyayi (1988) · Janet Frame (1989) · Mordecai Richler (1990)
1991–2000

David Malouf (1991) · Rohinton Mistry (1992) · Alex Miller (1993) · Vikram Seth (1994) · Louis de Bernières (1995) · Rohinton Mistry (1996) · Earl Lovelace (1997) · Peter Carey (1998) · Murray Bail (1999) · J.M. Coetzee (2000)
2001–present

Peter Carey (2001) · Richard Flanagan (2002) · Austin Clarke (2003) · Caryl Phillips (2004) · Andrea Levy (2005) · Kate Grenville (2006) · Lloyd Jones (2007) · Lawrence Hill (2008) · Christos Tsiolkas (2009)

External links

Search Wikiquote Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Mordecai Richler

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

 
 

 

Copyrights:

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Biography. © 2006 through a partnership of Answers Corporation. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/.  Read more
Quotes By. Copyright © 2008 QuotationsBook.com. All rights reserved.  Read more
Writer. Copyright © 2009 All Media Guide, LLC. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Mordecai Richler".  Read more