John Desmond Peter was an English literature scholar, essayist, and novelist, was born in South Africa

South Africa

The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...

. He studied law at the University of South Africa

University of South Africa

The University of South Africa is a distance education university, with headquarters in Pretoria, South Africa. With approximately 300 000 enrolled students, it qualifies as one of the world's mega universities.-History:...

, and English literature at Cambridge University, later obtaining his Ph.D. from Rhodes University

Rhodes University

Rhodes University is a public research university located in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, established in 1904. It is the province’s oldest university, and is one of the four universities in the province...

.

Peter came to Canada in 1950 and taught English at the University of Manitoba

University of Manitoba

The University of Manitoba , in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, is the largest university in the province of Manitoba. It is Manitoba's most comprehensive and only research-intensive post-secondary educational institution. It was founded in 1877, making it Western Canada’s first university. It placed...

 for eleven years. He joined the Victoria College

Victoria College

Victoria College is or was the name of several institutions of secondary or higher education, including:* [Victoria College, Chulipuram], Sri Lanka* Victoria College, Alexandria, Egypt* Victoria College in Victoria, Texas...

 Department of English in 1961. He was co-founder, with Robin Skelton

Robin Skelton

Robin Skelton was a British-born academic, writer, poet, and anthologist.Born in Easington, Yorkshire, Skelton was educated at the University of Leeds and Cambridge University. From 1944 to 1947, he served with the Royal Air Force in India. He later taught at Manchester University...

, of the literary magazine Malahat Review.

He is remembered mostly widely for his 1952 essay "A New Interpretation of The Waste Land

The Waste Land

The Waste Land[A] is a 434-line[B] modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century." Despite the poem's obscurity—its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its...

", in which he interpreted T.S. Eliot's poem as an elegy for a dead (male) friend, Jean Verdenal. At the instance of Eliot's solicitors, it was suppressed and only republished in 1969, four years after Eliot's death.

Criticism

• Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature (1956)
• A Critique of "Paradise Lost" (1960)

Novels

• Along That Coast (1964) winner of the Doubleday Canadian Novel Prize
• Take Hands at Winter (1967)
• Runaway (1969)

External links

• John Peter fonds at University of Victoria, Special Collections