Description
Book SynopsisIn the four decades between 1920 and 1960, William Deacon, Canada's first full-time literary journalist, devoted his career to the twin goals of fostering a Canadian readership for Canadian writers and creating a sense of community among those writers. His reviews in
Saturday Night,
The Mail and Empire, and
Globe and Mail were the most widely read literary commentary of his day. His vast correspondence with a wide range of writers, politicians, historians, cultural nationalists and a select number of eccentrics created a forty-year dialogue in which is ideas about writing, publishing culture, and politics were shared, formulated, and debated with a formidable array of personal and literary friends, among them E.J. Pratt, Laura Goodman Salverson, Duncan Campbell Scott, A.R.M. Lower, J.S. Woodsworth, Thomas Raddall, Hugh MacLennan, and Mazo de la Roche.
The exchanges trade the ebullient cultural nationalism of the 1920s and Deacon's enthusiastic immersion i