The Kissing Man

George Elliott

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The Kissing Man is a series of eleven short stories set in an unnamed small town in southwestern Ontario in the middle of the twentieth century. The rural setting is real and recognizable -- with its dry-goods store, the Queen’s Hotel, the mill pond, the axe-handle factory, the Anglican cemetery, the barber shop -- but the stories are other-worldly fables or fairy tales, mixing the everyday and the extraordinary, the mundane and the marvellous. The kissing man himself appears mysteriously and transforms the lives of the lonely. Although he does not cure them of their fear and their need, he provides small moments of solace with his compassion and understanding. First published in 1962, George Elliott’s The Kissing Man is a classic short story sequence in the tradition that includes Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town and Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women.

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George Elliott was born in London, Ontario, in 1923. He attended the University of Toronto, where he edited the student newspaper, The Varsity. When the Second World War broke out, his poor eyesight prevented his military service and he became editor of the Strathroy Age-Dispatch while acting as Strathroy correspondent for the London Free Press. He later became a reporter and city editor with the Timmins Daily Press, and local correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star. His career in journalism preceded an even more successful career as an advertising executive.

In 1962, he published his first work of fiction, The Kissing Man. He uses the southwestern Ontario world of his childhood as the setting of eleven connected short stories that examine the continuing communal traditions among three generations of characters.

George Elliott died in Île d’Orléans, Quebec, in 1996.