Manuscript Collection MS COLL 00457 - Richard Outram Papers

Richard Daley Outram was born in Oshawa, Ontario, in 1930. From 1949 to 1953, he was enrolled in the Honours B.A., English and Philosophy course at Victoria College in the University of Toronto. After graduation, Outram worked with the CBC as a television stagehand for a year, then he moved to London, England. During those years he began to write poetry. While in London, he met his future wife, the Toronto painter and wood-engraver Barbara Howard. They returned to Toronto to marry in 1957, and Outram went back to work with the CBC. Between 1966 and 2001, Outram wrote ten commercially published collections of poetry. In addition to these, Outram issued over a dozen other collections of poetry and prose under the imprint of The Gauntlet Press, which he founded with his wife in the 1960s. Having lost his wife in 2002, Outram took his own life, dying of hypothermia in Port Hope, Ont., 2005.