When Timothy Findley died in 2002, several tributes quoted his self‐description as “a dedicated anti‐fascist writer and thinker” (Benson 1986). And though this was clearly true, as evinced by his fictional portraits of the terrors of Nazi ideology in novels like The Butterfly Plague (1969) and Famous Last Words (1981), Findley's label was accurate in a broader sense. His oeuvre – 10 novels, a novella, seven plays, three collections of stories, three autobiographical collections, and numerous television and radio scripts – was devoted to an exploration of the will to power and its costs. In a prose style that placed point‐blank, emphatic statement next to passages of flowing, baroque theatricality, Findley produced a fiction of dramatic statement that captured many readers. His plays, though slower to win favor with audiences, culminated in the acclaimed productions of Elizabeth Rex (2003a) in the last two years of his life.