W. J. Keith (William John Keith) (1934–2018) was born in England. After school he was called up for two years National Service (1953-5), where he taught as a Sergeant-Instructor in the Royal Army Education Corps both in Sussex and with the British Army of the Rhine. From 1955-1961 he obtained degrees in English from Cambridge and the University of Toronto, where he then taught for nearly a quarter-century. A Professor Emeritus, Keith was editor of the University of Toronto Quarterly from 1976 to 1985, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1979. He was the author of A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada, Epic Fiction: The Art of Rudy Wiebe (1981), Canadian Literature in English (1985), and Introducing Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman (1989).