LibGuides: Prairie Immigration Experience: Frederick Philip Grove fonds

Biographical Sketch: Grove arrived in Manitoba in September 1912. Although he kept his prior life very much a secret, he was born in 1879 as Felix Paul Greve in Radomno, a small Prussian town on the German-Polish border (after 1918). Greve grew up in Hamburg where he graduated from the famous humanistic Gymnasium Johanneum in 1898 & then studied classical philology at Bonn University. In late July 1909 he faked his suicide and immigrated to North America, taking second class passage on the White Star Liner "Megantic" from Liverpool to Montreal. The three years spent in the United States are described in ASA, 1927, except that Grove fails to mention the year he operated a small farm in Sparta, Ky., with Else who had rejoined him in Pittsburgh in 1910. In Canada, he was a teacher/principal in a variety of rural schools, including Rapid City where he lived for seven years before moving to Ottawa in 1929. There, he joined Graphic Publishers until 1931, when he settled on an estate in Simcoe, Ontario. Grove wrote and his wife Catherine Wiens opened a Froebel Kindergarten. Grove suffered a crippling stroke in 1944 and although he continued to write, his health deteriorated. He died on August 19, 1948. -- During his Manitoba years between 1919 and 1929, Grove published twelve books, including Over Prairie Trails (1922), The Turn of the Year (1923), Settlers of the Marsh (1925), A Search for America (ASA, 1927, eEd. 2000), Our Daily Bread (1928) and It Needs to be Said (1929). He also wrote many short stories, reviews, essays and articles, and a very large number of poems (publ. 1993, eEd. 2007). In Ontario, several more books were published, starting with The Yoke of Life (1930). Fruits of the Earth (1933), Master of the Mill (1944), and his official autobiography In Search of Myself (ISM, 1946, eEd. 2007) followed. His "ant-book", the Swiftian satire Consider Her Ways (1947), was published as a fragment. Many more unfinished typescripts are among his papers. -- Grove was indebted to Stefan George's "Mache" or way of crafting for all his poetry, and to Flaubert's symbolic realism for his prose works. He is a key figure in Canadian literary history and is known for his vivid descriptions of life on the prairies which often tended to be dark and difficult.

Digitized Material: The digitized material from the Frederick Philip Grove fonds includes correspondence with I. Warkentin describing life in Canada in 1913, manuscripts written by Grove describing the experiences of immigrants, documents relating to Grove's Canadian 1921 citizenship, and photographs depicting Grove's home in Ashfield, MB. -- See the FPG (Greve/Grove) & FrL (Freytag-Loringhoven) Website for further information & scholarly e-Editions.

Click here to view a full description of the Frederick Philip Grove fonds.

[ Back to Prairie Immigration Experience ]