At the age of six — a year before the family moved from Sault Ste. Marie and settled in Toronto in order to be nearer Carl Atwood's job on the staff of the University of Toronto — Atwood displayed her precocity by composing a self-illustrated verse series, "Rhyming Cats." To vex her free-thinking parents, she attended United Church of Canada services and dabbled in Unitarianism, Quakerism, and spiritualism.
The Atwoods, both voracious readers, stimulated their pixieish, articulate daughter's intellect without suggesting any particular outlet. Atwood read comic books, Grimm's Fairy Tales, Beatrix Potter classics, and the standard children's canon before attacking heavier classics, among them James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, Sherlock Holmes' mysteries, Twain's adventure novels, Bible stories, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, and Moby Dick. A child of World War 11, she read in her pre-teen years the war histories, Rommel in the Desert, Mein Kampf, and Churchill's writings as well as Brave New World, 1984, and Animal Farm. Her interest in writing, encouraged by her aunt, Ann Blades, dates to 1944, then inexplicably enters a dry period to begin again in Atwood's mid-teens, when she wrote for the Leaside High School literary magazine, Clan Call.
