Max Braithwaite

Canadian writer Max Braithwaite died Sunday, March 19, at his home in Brighton, Ontario.  He was 83.

After a long and prolific free-lance career that tapped virtually every market for writing in Canada, Mr. Braithwaite found a novelist's voice in 1965 with Why Shoot the Teacher.  A recollection of his first teaching job in a starved-out Saskatchewan farming community in the hungry 30s, Why Shoot later became a successful film of the same name.

Two more books in Mr. Braithwaite's prairie trilogy followed:  Never Sleep Three in a Bed (1969) and in 1971, The Night We Stole the Mountie's Car, which won Mr. Braithwaite the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour in 1972.

The popularity of Mr. Braithwaite's short, wry, and dusty recollections of the Depression era on the Canadian prairies marked a turning point in his career. It won him a large following of readers across Canada and, in June 1986, an honorary doctorate from the University of Calgary, where he donned academic robes to tell a graduating class of young teachers how much he had disliked their profession.

Mr. Braithwaite sold his first article in 1937.  He and a friend collaborated on a critique of Saskatchewan education called School Drought, and Maclean's Magazine published it.  Mr. Braithwaite took his half of the $75 check and bought a used typewriter.

His career advanced quickly after the Canadian navy transferred him from Saskatoon to Toronto in 1944.  At HMCS York, where he served as head schoolmaster, he met C.J. Harris, editor of Liberty Magazine, and Scott Young, articles editor at Maclean's -- men who turned out to be key professional contacts and lifelong friends.

He emerged from the navy in 1945 a free-lance writer.  Since then, he once wrote, “I have made my living entirely from writing.  No grants, no teaching, no writer-in-residence, nothing but writing.”

He wrote for magazines like Liberty and Maclean's, for CBC dramatic series like Buckingham Theatre and Ford Theatre, and later for CBC television. He returned to thousands of Canadian classrooms electronically as the author of Voices of the Wild, an educational series that ran for 17 years on CBC radio.

In 1962, Voices of the Wild was published as Mr. Braithwaite's first book and a long series of textbooks, supplementary reading books and children's adventure series followed.  In the later phase of his career, when he found the time and financial freedom to choose his own material, Mr. Braithwaite's brisk novels came to form a running commentary on Canadian life.

He continued to write from his own experiences in the West, notably The Commodore's Barge is Alongside (1979) and All the Way Home (1986).  But his own post-war life in Ontario also provided material for some of Mr. Braithwaite's best novels.  A Privilege and a Pleasure (1973), about a sleepy Ontario town that is swept up in the social cyclones of the late ’60s, reflects the years Mr. Braithwaite lived in Orangeville, raising a family of five children.

Lusty Winter and McGruber's Folly are set in the cottage area of Muskoka, where Max and Aileen Braithwaite lived after the children were grown, converting a summer place on Brandy Lake into a year-round home.  They moved from Port Carling to Brighton in 1989.

Max Braithwaite was born in Nokomis, Saskatchewan, on December 7, 1911. He was the son of two Ontario natives, George Albert Warner Braithwaite and Marie Copeland.  Max grew up in Nokomis, Prince Albert, and Saskatoon.

In October 1935, he married Aileen Treleaven, whom he met in the fall of 1934 when he took a teaching job in Fielding, Saskatchewan.  “This was by far the most important event of my life,” he wrote later.

Mr. Braithwaite is survived by his wife and their five children:  Beryl Hart of Warner Springs, California; Sharon Siamon of Toronto;  Chris Braithwaite of West Glover, Vermont; Sylvia Braithwaite of Ottawa; and Colin Braithwaite of Toronto.  He is also survived by 12 grandchildren and one great-grandchild; by his sister, Betty Smith, and by two brothers, Hubert and Basil Braithwaite.