Robert James Campbell Stead was a Canadian novelist. Stead was born in Middleville, Ontario. In 1882, the family established a property in Cartwright, Manitoba. In 1899, at the age of 18, he started a weekly newspaper in Cartwright. His first book, The Empire Builders and Other Poems, was released in 1908, and for the next 23 years, until 1931, he wrote novels, short stories, and collections of verse that enriched the depiction of Canadian prairie life. According to Terrence Craig, "In his early poetry, such as The Empire Builders and Other Poems (1908), Stead mixed styles of Service and Kipling to produce a virulently nationalist concept of Canada and Canadians." Stead spent a large amount of time working in the immigration department of the Canadian Pacific Railway in Calgary, where he wrote "reams of rose-hued prose extolling the clean, healthy vigour of life in the open spaces-spaces opened courtesy of the CPR and available at good prices." On his own time, he works in the same style," and has become one of Canada's most well-known authors. Stead is most remembered for his novel Grain (1926). Dry Water, a novel he wrote in the early 1930s but was unable to find a publisher owing to the Depression, was released by the University of Ottawa Press in 2008.
