Clara Thomas (1919- ), born in London, Ontario, taught at the University of Western Ontario and York University. "Canadian Novelists: 1920-45" and "Love and Work Enough: The Life of Anna Jameson" were her M.A. and Ph.D. theses. She has written articles and reviews and "The Manawaka World of Margaret Laurence," "All My Sisters: Essays on the Work of Canadian Women Writers," and "William Arthur Deacon: A Canadian Literary Life." "Chapters in a Lucky Life" (Borealis) is her autobiography.

My birth year, 1919, and my birth month, May, seem lucky to me now, for when I began to take notice and remember, we were at the very cross-over of an old world to a new. At Grandma's house, where I spent a lot of time, there were copies of old London Illustrated News and war-time newspapers piled on the shelves of the "little room" where old school books and some cast off-furniture found a home ... Grandma had been particularly caught up in the tragic story of the Russian Royal Family and I drank in all the many pictures of them and to the extent I could understand, the accounts of their murder from the black-bordered pages of the London Advertiser ... On the beach at Grand Bend on Lake Huron, when I was five years old, I saw my first airplane. Three years later, when Lindbergh flew the Atlantic to Paris alone, my father listened on our crystal set radio to the ticker tape welcome when he returned to New York and told the rest of us all about it.
Selected by Clara Thomas from Chapters In a Lucky Life,
Copyright © by Clara Thomas, 1999