Leon Edel, honourary Doctor of Literature degree recipient, speaking from podium during Convocation held at Centennial Auditorium.

Bio/Historical Note: Leon Edel, the son of Russian immigrants, was born in 1907 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The family moved to Saskatchewan in 1910, where his father opened a store in Jansen. Several years later the family moved to Yorkton and in the ten formative years that followed, Edel attended elementary and secondary school, and worked during the summers as a copy boy for a Yorkton newspaper. Edel also reported the social and personal events of the town, watching those who got on and off the various trains, and in this way began a long association with journalism. Edel was fascinated with the cultural mosaic of Ukrainians, Czechs, Germans, Mennonites and Doukhobors tie up their carts at his father's store, who ran the icy mile from home to Victoria School, whose father, in the absence of a town library, brought books back from Winnipeg on the overnight train, and who saw his milkman disappear one day later to perish on a foreign battlefield. When Edel was sixteen years old, the family moved to Montreal, and he entered McGill University, majoring in English literature. While there Edel became associated with the Montreal Group of modernist writers, which included Frank R. Scott and A.J.M. Smith, and with them founded the influential McGill Fortnightly Review. Edel taught English and American literature at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University, 1932–1934), New York University (1953–1972),and at University of Hawaii at Manoa (1972–1978). For the academic year 1965–1966, he was a Fellow on the faculty at the Center for Advanced Studies of Wesleyan University. Though he wrote on James Joyce (James Joyce: The Last Journey, 1947) and on the Bloomsbury group, his lifework is summed up in his five-volume biography of Henry James (Henry James: A Biography 1953–1972). The University of Saskatchewan awarded a honourary Doctor of Literature degree in 1983. Edel died in Honolulu in 1997.