Roberts, George Edward Theodore Goodridge

  • From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: See full biography at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Goodridge_Roberts
  • Wiki profile notes:
    • George Edwards Theodore Goodridge Roberts (July 7, 1877 – February 24, 1953) was a Canadian novelist and poet. He was the author of thirty-four novels and over one hundred published stories and poems.
    • He was the brother of poet Charles G. D. Roberts, and the father of painter Goodridge Roberts.
    • Roberts was born in Fredericton, to Emma Wetmore Bliss and Anglican Rev. George Goodridge Roberts. The poet Charles G. D. Roberts, and the writers William Carman Roberts and Elizabeth Roberts MacDonald, were his siblings.
    • He published his first poem in 1889, when he was eleven, in the New York Independent (where his cousin Bliss Carman was working), and his first prose piece (a comparison of the Battle of Waterloo and the Battle of Gettysburg) in the Century two years later.
    • The Dictionary of Literary Biography (DLB) says that T.G. Roberts’s “poetry and fiction, staggering in sheer quantity and variety, show at their best Roberts’s most enduring gifts: in his poetry a love of nature well served by a keen eye for local color and detail, a good ear for clean, clear rhythm and rhyme, and a forceful, uncluttered narrative line; and in fiction a talent for presenting his abiding perception of universal struggles between good and evil either in mythic tales of adventure or in regional stories animated by local settings, customs, and dialects.”
    • Of the poems in his 1926 collection, The Lost Shipmate, The Encyclopedia of Literature commented: “Had this volume appeared forty years earlier it might have won for Theodore a reputation equal to that of his brother Charles or of Bliss Carman. Poems such as ‘The sandbar’ and ‘Magic’ are unmatched in Canadian poetry for a facility and clarity of image suggestive of high-realist painting.
    • The writing that Roberts is most likely to be recognized for today is The Merriest Knight, his collection of Arthurian tales. This looks like the one book by Roberts currently in print- ironically, considering that it was never published as a book during Roberts’s lifetime.
  • Second Great Grandson of Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory – https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=643
  • Find a GRAVE: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/114704327/theodore_goodridge-roberts