George Woodcock
| George Woodcock | |
|---|---|
| Born | May 8, 1912 Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada |
| Died |
January 28, 1995 (aged 82) Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada |
| Language | English |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Genre | Political biography, critical essays |
| Subject | Anarchism |
| Relatives | Arthur Woodcock (father) Margaret Gertrude Lewis (mother) |
George Woodcock (/ˈwʊdˌkɑːk/; May 8, 1912 – January 28, 1995) was a Canadian writer of political biography and history, an anarchist thinker, an essayist and literary critic. He was also a poet and published several volumes of travel writing. In 1959 he was the founding editor of the journal Canadian Literature which was the first academic journal specifically dedicated to Canadian writing. He is most commonly known outside of Canada for his book Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (1962).
Woodcock was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, but moved with his parents to England at an early age, attending Sir William Borlase's Grammar School in Marlow and Morley College. Though his family was quite poor, Woodcock's grandfather offered to pay his tuition if he went to Cambridge University which he turned down due to the condition that he undertake seminary training for the Anglican clergy. Instead, he took a job as a clerk at the Great Western Railway and it was there that he first became interested in anarchism. He was to remain an anarchist for the rest of his life, writing several books on the subject, including Anarchism, the anthology The Anarchist Reader (1977), and biographies of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, William Godwin, Oscar Wilde and Peter Kropotkin. It was during these years that he met several prominent literary figures, including T. S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley. Woodcock's first published work was The White Island, a collection of poetry, which was issued by Fortune Press in 1940.
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