Think of the Earth
1936 novel by Bertram Brooker
Think of the Earth is a 1936 novel by the Canadian novelist Bertram Brooker. The book won the first Governor General's Award for fiction in 1936.
Synopsis
An expatriate Englishman has a weekend of self-discovery in Manitoba: he falls in love, and realizes that he must become less introspective. The protagonist, Geoff Tavistock, visits a small town in rural Manitoba in 1907. Tavistock believes he is on a divinely inspired mission - to reconcile man with God once and for all.
Reception
Sales of the initial publication in 1936 were slow and Brooker acknowledged that by the time his book was awarded the Governor General's Award, only eight copies had been sold.
Think of the Earth has been portrayed as an example of ressentiment, a retelling of Crime and Punishment set as a historical novel of the Canadian Prairies in which a Nietzschean superman dreams of bringing his transvalued sense of justice to a primitive rural society.
Literary critic John Moss characterized the book as being about a visionary experience but the book was not a visionary experience in itself. Moss called the prose awkward and the mood sombre. The protagonist Tavistock is portrayed as an eccentric without any trace of irony, an improbable messiah.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Think of the Earth” as 1936 novel by Bertram Brooker. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as 1936 novel by Bertram Brooker. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q61767374. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1936 and 1907.
Titles can refer to several editions, objects or performances, making precise identification essential before interpretation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
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Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Think of the Earth” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.