This wildly funny twist on the "How I spent my summer vacation" school-essay ritual details one child's imaginary adventures over the summer and is perfect for back-to-school reading! Most kids go to camp over the summer, or to Grandma's house, or maybe they're stuck at home. Not Wallace Bleff. He was supposed to visit his Aunt Fern. Instead, Wallace insists, he was carried off by cowboys and taught the ways of the West--from riding buckin' broncos to roping cattle. Lucky for Aunt Fern, he showed up at her house just in time to divert a stampede from her barbecue party! Perfect for back-to-school read-alouds, here's a western fantasy with sparkling illustrations and enough action to knock kids' boots off!

When How I Spent My Summer Holidays was first published in 1981 a Western reviewer wrote: “If Who Has Seen the Wind told the story of a young boy’s coming to terms with death, How I Spent My Summer Holidays tells of a young man’s attempt to come to terms with his own sexuality and that of the world around him.” The twelve-year-old young man is Hugh, and in small-town Saskatchewan it is the hot summer of 1924. When Hugh and his friends dig a secret cave out on the Prairie, they soon find it occupied by an escaped patient from the mental hospital. Defying the adult world, the boys become involved with a former war hero and current rum-runner, King Motherwell, in sheltering and feeding the runaway. When passions aroused by sex explode into murder, Hugh leaves his boyhood behind him for ever.

Nearly 40 years after the publication of Who Has Seen the Wind, W.O. Mitchell returned to the Prairies to take another look at that earlier novel's treatment of childhood innocence. From old age, Hugh looks back at the summer of 1924, when he was 12. Hugh's experience is markedly different from young Brian O'Connal's in Who Has Seen the Wind. Here we find more sinister characters lurking in the background, including King Motherwell, an alcoholic bootlegger who murders his wife and lands in an insane asylum, and who is responsible for bringing Hugh's childhood to an end. Mitchell's publisher, Douglas Gibson, described the relationship between Who Has Seen the Wind and How I Spent My Summer Holidays as akin to that between Tom Sawyer and the darker, deeper Huckleberry Finn.?But though it is a much darker coming-of-age story, How I Spent My Summer Holidays retains Mitchell's love of the landscape, and there is still a sense of the gleeful joy of childhood when Hugh and his friend Peter set out to dig a secret cave. Even Hugh's boyish adulation for the adventurous King is understandable to a point. But the gentle Saint Sammy of the earlier book has been replaced by the tortured Billy, who has escaped from the abuses of the local insane asylum. How I Spent My Summer Holidays takes a more balanced look at rural Canadian life early in the 20th century than did Mitchells first novel, but it is still a portrait full of affection.

This volume discusses the autobiographical inclination in Canadian literature, exploring works by such writers as Alice Munro, W.O. Mitchell, Michael Ondaatje, John Glassco, and Susanna Moodie. Others works, including the oral memoirs of a Métis, an Inuit's account as being civil servant in Ottawa, and the autobiographical writings of pioneer women and French missionaries are examined to show the depth and breadth of this tradition in Canada. These texts act as starting points for an in depth look at the relationships between autobiography, biography and fiction in Canadian literature. Published in English.