In 1934, aspiring Toronto-born artist Alan Collier wrote to his intended from Vancouver, “I have decided that it is impossible for me to get a job … if I can’t get in a relief camp for the winter, I’ll be back to Toronto sometime this fall."Alan Caswell Collier (1911–90) went on to become one of Canada’s most successful landscape artists, but during the Depression he joined the thousands of single, unemployed men who rode the rails and hitchhiked across North America in search of jobs. He eventually made his way to British Columbia’s remote government-run relief camps. Labouring for twenty cents a day, he detailed camp life and politics in letters to his fiancée and depicted his fellow “relief stiffs" and the BC landscape in character sketches and paintings. llustrated with well-known paintings and never-before-published sketches, portraits, and landscapes, Alan Caswell Collier, Relief Stiff captures in vivid detail a world where the Department of National Defence offered youths bed and board, clothes, tobacco, and twenty cents a day but few outlets for their anger and discontent. In the spring of 1935, men from the camps participated in the Communist-led On-to-Ottawa Trek, a defining event in Canadian history. Collier, a born contrarian with a strong sense of social superiority, resisted the mobilization that led to the Trek, but in the 1940s he became a union activist and an ardent social democrat. Incisive, fresh, and opinionated, Collier’s letters peel back time, opening a window on the feelings and thoughts of an eminent Ontario artist and on a generation who came of age during an era of economic upheaval and class conflict. | Alan Caswell Collier Relief Stiff by Peter Neary, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters