Identity area
Type of entity
Authorized form of name
Parallel form(s) of name
Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules
Other form(s) of name
- Green, Marie Willard
- Green Duncan, Marie
Identifiers for corporate bodies
Description area
Dates of existence
History
Marie McPhedran was born in Sault Ste. Marie in 1900 and had attended University College for the academic year 1921-1922, before leaving for Normal School to help put her brothers through university. In 1927 she married Gordon George Duncan, captain of the Varsity intercollegiate football champion team in 1921 and a 1923 graduate in mining engineering. In the latter year he was appointed field engineer for the Mining Corporation of Canada in the new mining town of Flin Flon, Manitoba. At the time of his marriage he was in charge of exploration work for the Hudson Bay Mining and Smelting Company. Marie was one of the first women to live there, and it was her experiences during these happy years that she drew on in writing her first book, Golden North. About 1928 Gordon made the first aerial flight into Bathurst Inlet. In 1929 he became director of field operations for the Northern Aerial Mining Exploration Company. He died in April, 1932. Having lost one kidney from a football injury, he succumbed when the other became tubercular. He was survived by his wife and a daughter, Kittie-Marie.
By the time she married Harris McPhedran in 1926, Marie was already writing short stories and had recently had published one about her experiences in the north. Over the next decade she wrote a large number of short stories for children, for which she had difficulty finding publishers. Her breakthrough came with her first novel, Golden North, the runner-up for the 1948 Governor-General's Award for juvenile fiction. Other books followed, including Cargoes on the Great Lakes, for which she won the 1952 Governor-General's Award. Later she began work on a biography of Jeanne Mance, but never completed it. She died on 1 September, 1974.