John Hugh MacLennan, a five-time winner of Canada’s prestigious Governor General’s Literary Award, contributed immensely to the creation of a distinct Canadian literature. His outstanding literary talents secured for him national and international acclaim before his death on November 9, 1990.

Although MacLennan regarded Halifax as his home town, he was born in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, a Cape Breton coastal community dominated, for many years, by the coal-mining industry. When he was seven years old, MacLennan moved with his family to Halifax. On the morning of December 6, 1917 he witnessed, as a ten-year-old boy, the Halifax explosion caused by the collision of a Belgian relief ship and a French munitions vessel. This explosion, estimated to have been the world’s worst before the dropping of the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, in August 1945, left an indelible impression on young MacLennan. No wonder! Sixteen hundred Haligonians died in the explosion, nine thousand were injured, and more than 25,000 lost their homes or encountered major difficulties as a result of property damage.

The explosion occurred at 8.45 A.M. Since classes in Halifax schools did not begin in those days until 9.30 A.M., MacLennan, was still at home and thus escaped death or injuries he might have suffered had he been in school.

On completion of his secondary school studies, MacLennan enrolled at Dalhousie University. Following graduation in 1929 he accepted a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. Then, after completing his work at Oxford, MacLennan travelled across Europe. During this period, the emergence of Hitler and Mussolini was generating widespread, international anxiety. MacLennan next went to Princeton University, New Jersey, where he earned a doctorate in classics. While there he began to write about international problems, some of which he had personally encountered.

Returning to Canada in 1935, MacLennan began his teaching career at Lower Canada College. At the outbreak of the Second World War he was aware that weapons of increasingly destructive power would be used. He remembered his experiences during the Halifax explosion when two-and-a-quarter square miles of the industrial section of the city had been completely destroyed: a raging fire had been followed by an enormous tidal wave. These experiences had given him a sense of what might happen in the Second World War.

During the summer of 1940, MacLennan began writing his first novel. Published the following year, Barometer Rising became a landmark publication not only exploring the tragic events of the great Halifax explosion but also dramatizing a Canadian setting. Indeed, the publication of Barometer Rising marked the beginning of a distinct Canadian literature written to appeal to an international audience.

MacLennan’s next work, Two Solitudes, published in 1945, examines the historic clash between the English and the French cultures of Canada. It was embraced both at home and abroad as a novel with international appeal. That same year he began teaching at McGill University where he continued as a member of the English department until 1981.

The Precipice, appearing in 1948, examines the strict Protestantism still prevailing in certain communities of Ontario in the 1940s. His exploration of the impact of Calvinism both on the individual and on social life stimulated widespread interest much beyond the Canadian border.

Each Man’s Son (1951) describes the escape of a Cape Breton youth from a life in the mines and draws upon MacLennan’s experience and knowledge of Nova Scotia. In that novel MacLennan provides fascinating portraits of the highlanders from Scotland who settled in that magnificent but industrially troubled section of Canada. His careful description of the beauty of the Cape Breton landscape is in sharp contrast with the coarseness of the company town with its tenement houses, row on row, and the exploitive aspects and dangers of its labour-intensive collieries. It gained international appeal because its coalmining town could be situated in England or Pennsylvania or any coal-mining region in the world. Such was the universality of MacLennan’s novels.

By the early 1950s MacLennan had gained a permanent position as an outstanding contributor to Canadian literature. His later novels — The Watch That Ends The Night (1959), Return of the Sphinx (1967), and Voice In Time (1980) — further enhanced his outstanding reputation. MacLennan’s essays also received enthusiastic response. The Other Side of Hugh MacLennan, published in 1978, is a collection of some of his widely admired essays.

The exceptional quality of MacLennan’s writing brought him many honours. He received, for example, the Royal Bank Award for 1984, established to honour a Canadian citizen or a person living in Canada “whose outstanding accomplishment makes an important contribution to human welfare and the common good.” In 1987 he was the first Canadian awarded the prestigious James Madison Medal which is granted each year to a Princeton University graduate who has earned outstanding distinction in his profession. This is particularly true of MacLennan, one of Canada’s internationally acclaimed authors.