The Black Bonspiel of Willie MacCrimmon - Hardcover

W.O. Mitchell, the only Canadian author recognizable by initials alone, was born in Weyburn, Saskatchewan in 1914. Educated at the University of Manitoba, he lived most of his life in Saskatchewan, Ontario, and Alberta, where for many years he was the most renowned resident in High River. He and his wife, Merna, subsequently moved to Calgary.

During a very varied career Bill Mitchell travelled widely and was everything from a Depression hobo to the fiction editor of Maclean’s. A gifted teacher, he was visiting professor at the University of Windsor for several years, and a creative writing instructor at the Banff Centre for many summers.

His best-loved book is Who Has Seen the Wind. Since its publication in 1947 it has sold over half a million copies in Canada alone, and is hailed as the greatest Canadian book on boyhood. The classic edition, illustrated by William Kurelek, became a bestseller in 1991. Complementing that book is his 1981 best-seller How I Spent My Summer Holidays, hailed by some critics as his finest novel, although Since Daisy Creek (1984) and Ladybug, Ladybug...(1988), Roses Are Difficult Here (1990), For Art's Sake (1992) and The Black Bonspiel of Willie MacCrimmon (1993), illustrated by Wesley W. Bates, were also well-received best-sellers. Besides The Kite (1962) and The Vanishing Point (1973), he was also noted for his two collections of short stories, Jake and the Kid (1962) and According to Jake and the Kid (1989). Based on the legendary CBC radio Series, both classic story collections won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour.

His last book, An Evening with W.O. Mitchell, contains his most popular performance pieces, and concludes with “The Poetry of Life”, the lecture that he delivered from a wheelchair to The Writers’ Union Conference in Winnipeg in 1996.

A noted performer of his own work, W.O. Mitchell recorded cassette versions of both Who Has Seen the Wind and According to Jake and the Kid, while a selection of pieces from An Evening with W.O. Mitchell, performed by W.O., is also available on cassette.

Our novelist and script-writer was also a successful playwright whose five plays are included in the collection entitled Dramatic W.O. Mitchell. He was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1973, and was an honorary member of the Privy Council. He was the subject of a National Film Board documentary, and in 1994 he was awarded the Writers Guild of Alberta Golden Pen Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 1996 the City of Calgary named its book prize in his honour. He was, in Pierre Berton’s words, “an original.”

W.O. Mitchell died in February 1998 at his home in Calgary.

In what may be the ultimate wry commentary on men's addiction to sports, Canadian writer Mitchell spins a whimsical yarn about curling, a popular game in which players sweep a stone disk across ice toward a target circle. Willie MacCrimmon, cobbler and bereaved widower, strikes a Faustian pact with the Devil: Willie's team will win the Canadian curling championship, but in return Willie must curl for the Devil in Hell (on artificial ice, of course)-unless the dour shoemaker and his Alberta team outcurl the Devil's men in a challenge match. The Satanic lineup features Judas, Guy Fawkes (the English agitator who conspired to blow up Parliament in 1605) and Macbeth-who soliloquizes, "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow / Curls on this petty pace from end to end." The raucous life-or-death contest climaxes with a mock magazine article reporting on the slippery triumph of good over evil. Illustrated with charmingly detailed black-and-white engravings, this odd tale, adapted from Mitchell's play (which began life as a magazine story), bristles with puckish humor.
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