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Hugh MacLennan
(1907-1990)

Active: 1933-1990 in Canada, USA, North America, England, Britain, Europe

(John Hugh MacLennan)

By Colin Hill (University of Toronto)

Indexing Data:

  • Active In: Canada, USA, North America, England, Britain, Europe
  • Born In: Canada, North America
  • Activity: Novelist, Essayist, Cultural Critic, Lecturer, Travel Writer, Literary Critic, Poet

Life, Works and Times

Reader Actions

Many consider Hugh MacLennan Canada’s first major contemporary writer, and the attention critics, readers, and the media paid to him at the height of his career was unprecedented in Canada. He won Canada’s most prestigious literary prize, the Governor General’s Award, five times, a feat no other author has achieved. The fact that he wrote ambitious novels about national identity as Canadian cultural nationalism was growing and peaking made his name for a time synonymous with Canadian literature as a whole. His novels are written, for the most part, in a traditional, straightforward and realistic style, and foreground ideas and theses about Canadian society, politics, and nationhood from a nationalistic perspective. MacLennan was also an

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First published 23 April 2004

Citation: Hill, Colin. "Hugh MacLennan". The Literary Encyclopedia. 23 April 2004.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2865, accessed 20 November 2009.]

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