Zone d'identification
Cote
Titre
Date(s)
- 1953-2008 (Production)
Niveau de description
Étendue matérielle et support
34.07 m of textual records and other material
Zone du contexte
Nom du producteur
Notice biographique
Rudy Henry Wiebe OC (born 4 October 1934) is a Canadian author and professor emeritus in the department of English at the University of Alberta since 1992. Rudy Wiebe was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in the year 2000.
Wiebe was born at Speedwell, near Fairholme, Saskatchewan, in what would later become his family's chicken barn. For thirteen years he lived in an isolated community of about 250 people, as part of the last generation of homesteaders to settle the Canadian west. He did not speak English until age six since Mennonites at that time customarily spoke Low German at home and standard German in church. He attended the small school three miles from his farm and the Speedwell Mennonite Brethren Church. In 1947, he moved with his family to Coaldale, Alberta.
He received his B.A. in 1956 from the University of Alberta and then studied under a Rotary International Fellowship at the University of Tübingen in West Germany, near Stuttgart. In Germany, he studied literature and theology and travelled to England, Austria, Switzerland and Italy. In 1962, he received a Bachelor of Theology degree from Mennonite Brethren Bible College in Winnipeg, now Canadian Mennonite University.
While in Winnipeg, he worked as the editor of the Mennonite Brethren Herald, a position he was asked to leave after the publication of his controversial debut novel Peace Shall Destroy Many (1962), the book that heralded a wave of Mennonite literature in the decades that followed.
Wiebe taught at Goshen College in Goshen, Indiana from 1963 to 1967, and taught at the University of Alberta in Edmonton for many decades after that.
In addition to Peace Shall Destroy Many, Wiebe's novels include First and Vital Candle (1966), The Blue Mountains of China (1970), The Temptations of Big Bear (1973), The Scorched-wood People (1977), The Mad Trapper (1980), My Lovely Enemy (1983), A Discovery of Strangers (1994), Sweeter Than All the World (2001), and Come Back (2014). He has also published collections of short stories, essays, and children's books. In 2006 he published a volume of memoirs about his childhood, entitled Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest. His work has explored the traditions and struggles of people in the Prairie provinces, both settlers, often Mennonite, and First Nations people.
Wiebe won the Governor General's Award for Fiction twice, for The Temptations of Big Bear (1973) and A Discovery of Strangers (1994). Thomas King says of The Temptations of Big Bear that "Wiebe captures the pathos and the emotion of Native people at a certain point in their history and he does it well ... Wiebe points out to us that Canada has not come to terms with Native peoples, that there is unfinished business to attend to." Wiebe was awarded the Royal Society of Canada's Lorne Pierce Medal in 1986. In 2000 he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 2003 Wiebe was a member of the jury for the Giller Prize.
Histoire archivistique
Acquired between 1976 and 2012. Accession 563/95.1, consisting of a videocassette recording of Maxine Hancock interviewing R. Wiebe at Strawberry Creek, Alberta, for the television series Stories of Our Becoming, donated by Winterborne Productions in 1994.
Source immédiate d'acquisition ou de transfert
Zone du contenu et de la structure
Portée et contenu
Fonds consists of correspondence; research material; notes; manuscripts of novels, short stories, children's literature, television plays and screenplays; speeches; lectures; works on R. Wiebe; and material relating to R. Wiebe's editing of short story anthologies. Includes material relating to R. Wiebe's teaching creative writing courses at the University of Alberta and to his involvement with the Writers' Union of Canada and Canada Council, as well as conferences, writers' festivals, committees, workshops, juries and readings. Accession 349/84.16, consisting of Glenbow Foundation manuscript Frank Collicutt and his Willow Springs Herefords, 1957 (photocopy), Accession 350/84.17 consisting of Glenbow Foundation manuscript Claude Gallinger and his Killearn Shorthorns, 1957 (photocopy), and Accession 386/86.08, consisting of Foothills, v. 1, no. 1, April 2, 1985 with article Wiebe: Riel is a legitimate, authentic, mythic hero by Kelly Pitman and 2 audiocassettes with a Riel workshop and a reading by R. Wiebe, filed with Accession 329/83.26 (box 44).
Appraisal, destruction and scheduling
Accruals
System of arrangement
Zone des conditions d'accès et d'utilisation
Conditions d’accès
Some items restricted.
Conditions governing reproduction
Language of material
Script of material
Language and script notes
Caractéristiques matérielle et contraintes techniques
Finding aids
Zone des sources complémentaires
Existence and location of originals
Existence and location of copies
Related units of description
Related fonds is the Aritha van Herk fonds, Accession 857/09.1 consisting of 1.32 m of textual records donated by A. van Herk and R. Wiebe which is restricted during their lifetimes.
Zone des notes
Note
Title based on contents of fonds.
Note
Further accruals expected.
Note
Includes 20 photographs, 13 diskettes, 3 videocassettes and 2 audiocassettes.
Identifiant(s) alternatif(s)
ckey
Mots-clés
Mots-clés - Sujets
- Authors, Canadian
- Poets, Canadian
- Mennonites
- Prairie Provinces » Prairie Provinces -- History
- Immigration and immigrants
- First Nations
- Justice, Administration of
- Trials
- Criminal investigation
- Colonialism
- Northwest Resistance, 1885
- Missions and missionaries
- Russian Canadians
- Short stories, Canadian
- Dramatists, Canadian
- Provincial Courts
- Children's literature
- Canadian Literary and Cultural Archives
Mots-clés - Lieux
Mots-clés - Noms
- Wiebe, Rudy Henry (Sujet)
Mots-clés - Genre
Zone du contrôle de la description
Identifiant de la description
Identifiant du service d'archives
Rules and/or conventions used
Statut
Niveau de détail
Dates of creation revision deletion
Langue(s)
Écriture(s)
Sources
Archivist's note
Accession 349/84.16, consisting of Glenbow Foundation manuscript Frank Collicutt and his Willow Springs Herefords, 1957 (photocopy), Accession 350/84.17 consisting of Glenbow Foundation manuscript Claude Gallinger and his Killearn Shorthorns, 1957 (photocopy), and Accession 386/86.08, consisting of Foothills, v. 1, no. 1, April 2, 1985 with article Wiebe: Riel is a legitimate, authentic, mythic hero by Kelly Pitman and 2 audiocassettes with a Riel workshop and a reading by R. Wiebe, filed with Accession 329/83.26 (box 44).
Archivist's note
March 2023 - New AtoM descriptions provided under combined XL spreadsheet. (CLC)