The literary standing of Frederick Philip Grove, who was born as Felix Paul Greve in Germany in 1879, rests primarily on his novels. An assessment of Grove's novels and short fiction benefits from a closer look both at his life in Germany and his early Canadian writing, for Grove's literary career in Canada can be seen as a moral and aesthetic turning away from his life as a German “immoraliste” (to borrow the title of André Gide's famous novel, which Greve had translated into German in 1905). Grove did indeed have good reason to carefully hide his German past. In his “autobiography” In Search of Myself (1946), for which he received the prestigious Governor General's Award for Non-fiction, he spun a new life story complete with a wealthy and cosmopolitan Anglo-Swedish family background. The revelation of his true identity by Douglas O. Spettigue in 1972 came as a big surprise to Canadian readers, who had been misled by the author's masterfully fabricated life story even beyond his death in 1948 (see Spettigue 1972 and 1973; Martens 2001).

The ambitious dream of the young and talented writer Felix Paul Greve to gain renown in Germany ended in disaster. His downfall was brought about not so much by the poor quality of his early literary works (a volume of poems and a verse drama), but rather by his predilection for living in grand style despite modest financial means and by his scandalous love affair with Else Endell, the wife of a well-known art nouveau architect. Following a one-year imprisonment for fraud in Bonn (1903/04), Greve fell into disgrace with the neo-Romantic literary circle of the influential German poet Stefan George, under whose spell he had taken his first steps as a writer. His prison experience weaned him from his earlier aestheticist infatuation, and his satiric treatment of the George circle in his novel Fanny Essler (1905) foreshadows the turn towards the kind of realism that would also characterize his Canadian fiction. Greve's vigorous attempts at paying off his debts by translating chiefly modern English and French writers proved abortive. In despair, he faked suicide in 1909 and left Germany via Liverpool for Montreal and from there traveled on to Pittsburgh, where he was joined by Else. Little is known of his three “American” years.