MacLennan, Hugh

Identity area

Type of entity

Person

Authorized form of name

MacLennan, Hugh

Parallel form(s) of name

    Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules

      Other form(s) of name

        Identifiers for corporate bodies

        Description area

        Dates of existence

        1907-1990

        History

        Hugh MacLennan was a Canadian novelist, essayist and professor. He was born at Glace Bay, Nova Scotia in 1907, the son of a Calvinist physician. He was strongly encouraged to study Classics by his father, and received a Rhodes Scholarship. While at Oxford he studied Greek and Latin, while also beginning to write poetry. He continued his education with a doctorate in Classics at Princeton University. He wrote his first novel while at Princeton, but was not able to publish it. He settled in Montreal and took a teaching job at Lower Canada College. After he failed to publish two finished novels, his wife convinced him to write about Canada. This resulted in his first published novel, Barometer Rising (1941), about life in Nova Scotia and the Halifax Explosion, which MacLennan had witnessed as a ten-year old. This was followed by his most famous novel, Two Solitudes (19145), which won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction. MacLennan would win four additional Governor General’s Awards in both fiction and non-fiction: The Precipice (1948), Cross-country (1949), Thirty and Three (1954) and The Watch That Ends the Night (1957). In 1951, MacLennan became a professor at McGill University, where he would teach Marian Engel and Leonard Cohen. In 1967, he was a made a Companion of the Order of Canada. He died in Montreal in 1990.

        Places

        Legal status

        Functions, occupations and activities

        Mandates/sources of authority

        Internal structures/genealogy

        General context

        Relationships area

        Access points area

        Subject access points

        Place access points

        Occupations

        Control area

        Authority record identifier

        Institution identifier

        Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto

        Rules and/or conventions used

        Status

        Level of detail

        Dates of creation, revision and deletion

        Language(s)

          Script(s)

            Sources

            Maintenance notes