Their house had no electricity and, she recalled, “If you grew up there, you read.” For her, it was but a short step from loving reading to loving writing.

It influenced the fiction of Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood, and remains a CanLit staple.Ītwood, by the way, learned to love reading during summer-long visits as a child from Ottawa to relatives at Clyde River in southwest Nova Scotia. critics to compare him to Hemingway, Steinbeck, D. In 1952, Ernest Buckler, who breathed the air of the Annapolis Valley nearly his entire life, published The Mountain and the Valley, a first novel that moved U.S. Maybe it’s not fog, but something in the air here inspires exceptional writers. Before Dickens, Haliburton became the most popular writer of comic fiction in English, and a founder of North American humour.įarley Mowat, winner of a Governor General’s Award, a dozen other prizes and nine honourary degrees, joked that he spent several months every year at his house in Cape Breton because the fog was so boring the place was perfect for writing. His mockery of colonial Nova Scotians and their relations with Britain and the U.S. Judge and politician Thomas Chandler Haliburton of Windsor in 1836 published the first international bestseller in what would become Canada, The Clockmaker, or the Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick of Slickville. For a small province, it’s been home to an amazing number of nationally and internationally recognized writers.

Saunders and MacLennan were part of a Nova Scotian phenomenon that no one has ever properly acknowledged. Writers campaigned in 1993 for the preservation of the place, but failed. Its key background is the Halifax Explosion and, while a schoolboy living in that house, MacLennan felt reverberations of the blast, and saw blood it spilled. He won five Governor General’s Awards, still more than anyone else, and his Barometer Rising (1941) is the first authentically Canadian novel. That’s what happened to Hugh MacLennan’s home opposite the Public Gardens on South Park Street. A developer will soon demolish the building. The book eventually sold seven million copies and Saunders published 23 more, but aside from a portrait that Just Us café recently installed, you won’t find public recognition of Saunders anywhere in the city, not even a plaque on her old home across Carleton Street from the café. It’s about a terrier’s rescue by an animal-loving family from a sadistic owner who cut off his ears. It was the first book by a Canadian to sell a million copies. Margaret Marshall Saunders of Halifax wrote Beautiful Joe in 1889.

Hugh maclennan barometer rising