I had never actually heard of R.E. Knowles (1868 – 1946) when William Toye asked me to write the entry for him in the Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature. In the course of my research I discovered an intriguing individual. A popular Presbyterian minister in southern Ontario who wrote best-selling novels on the side, he fell from grace (apparently owing to alcoholism or mental illness), lost his ministry and his wife, and disappeared for five years. When he re-emerged, it was to forge an entirely new career as a writer with the Toronto Star (1922-40), where he functioned as a somewhat weird eccentric. His front-page interviews introduced Torontonians to celebrities visiting the city; they were written with notable self-dramatization and flowery loquaciousness, but also with humour and a novelist’s ear for dialogue.

John Robert Colombo read my Companion entry and asked whether I might like to write a more extensive biography as a preface to a collection of Knowles’ interviews he was planning. I agreed, and had lots of fun following elusive biographical hints – even miraculously finding his granddaughters through an advertisement in the New Bern, North Carolina local paper, and travelling there for a memorable visit. Eventually I ended up finding and editing the interviews themselves, assisted by a research assistant, Margaret Fraser, and my daughter Carrie. Knowles would talk to anyone he could prevail upon to talk to him, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Babe Ruth. A list of some 1500 interviews we found is available in the book and in a bibliography, Special Writer, in the Toronto Reference Library. The interviews chosen for publication---those with William Butler Yeats, Fritz Kreisler, Mary Pickford, Grey Owl and thirty others---provide a treasury of information on interwar culture and social history, besides being fun to read for anyone who enjoys exploring the byways of Toronto’s and Canada’s past.