John Bentley Mays, Canadian journalist and novelist, Died at 75

  Writer

John Bentley Mays was born on June 22, 1941, and died on September 16, 2016.

He was a Canadian journalist and writer.

Mays was best known as an art and architecture columnist for The Globe and Mail, he also published a novel and several non-fiction books.

He was born in rural Louisiana in 1941.

John’s parents died when he was a child, his father in a car accident and his mother of cancer, and he was raised thereafter by relatives in Shreveport.

Mays studied medieval literature and literary criticism at the University of Rochester, and moved to Toronto in 1969 to accept a teaching job at York University.

John married Margaret Cannon in 1971, and published his first novel, The Spiral Stair, in 1978.

Then in 1980 he joined The Globe and Mail.

During 1994, John published Emerald City: Toronto Visited, a collection of essays about Toronto architecture and history.

In the year he published In the Jaws of the Black Dogs, a memoir of his lifelong struggle with clinical depression.

In his book, Mays also came out as bisexual by orientation, although he noted that for personal and religious reasons he had chosen to remain monogamously married to his wife rather than exploring his attractions to men.

During 1997 he published Power in the Blood, a memoir about exploring his family history after the death of his aunt Vandalia in 1990.

His book was shortlisted for that year’s Viacom Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction.

During 2002 he published Arrivals: Stories from the History of Ontario, a book about Ontario history.

His book won the Joseph Brant Award from the Ontario Historical Society.

John was a freelance writer for a variety of publications in this era, until rejoining The Globe and Mail in 2008 as an architecture columnist.

He died due to a heart attack.

John Bentley Mays passed away at 75 years old.