The crankiest literary doppelganger

Or, how to be clever in Canada

There’s never been a writer like Samuel Marchbanks, mainly because there never was a Samuel Marchbanks. The self-proclaimed Philosopher of Skunk’s Misery, head of a one-man splinter party, and mid-century diarist in the Peterborough Examiner was also a pseudonym of Robertson Davies. Not his alter ego — a term that “suggests some dreadful non-cholesterol cooking substance,” Marchbanks insisted — but rather his doppelgänger.