Description
Book SynopsisWilliam Arthur Deacon was an intellectual patron and prophet in Canadian writing. For forty years, as literary editor of Saturday Night (1922-8), The Mail and Empire (1928-36), and The Globe and Mail (1936-60) he contributed vast amounts of time and energy to building a readership and a sympathetic climate for Canadian writers and writing. His correspondence put him in touch, as no other reviewer before him, with virtually every English- and French-Canadian author of his time.
Based on his correspondence, books, and review columns, the biography views Deacon’s life in terms of this involvement and in the context of the cultural and political forces of his time. Deacon’s early years as a lawyer, his self-imposed literary apprenticeship, and his break with the law as a profession concurred with the sense of mission and destiny that were part of his Methodist family background and his personal theosophical beliefs. Coming to Toronto in 1922, he quickly established
