Mount - Arrival: the story of CanLit

The Story of CanLit

Nick Mount

I WROTE THIS BOOK BECAUSE IT DIDNT EXIST. We have many excellent biographies of the writers who emerged during what came to be called the CanLit boom. We also have some good histories of the publishing side of the story in both English and French Canada, and a great many books about the time itself. What we dont have is a book that puts all those stories together. This is the first book to try to do that, to tell the whole story, for both those who know parts of it and those who know none of it. Im an academic, and this book builds on existing scholarship as well as many new interviews and many hours in many archives. But its not an academic book. I just wanted to tell a story, or bring together many stories between a single set of covers.

Several people with whom I spoke for this book hoped it would also evaluate the writing left behind by the CanLit boom, that the time had come to separate great books from honest work. I didnt want to write that book time and readers generally do a better job than critics of preserving the books that matter, and I didnt want criticism to get in the way of an already large story. But for those people, and because I am a reader too, I have placed throughout this book brief assessments of the most popular, acclaimed, or otherwise remarkable books from the period. No doubt foolishly, I have rated each of these books using the following system:

got published

occasionally interesting

very good

excellent; among the best of its kind

world classic

I had hoped a digital version of this book would allow readers to disagree with my ratings and modify them over time that, as they say, there would be an app for that. This hasnt turned out to be possible, so youll just have to disagree the old-fashioned way, by writing your own ranking in the margin. (Or by telling me Im wrong on Twitter, if its still around: @profnickmount.) I have tried to place these reviews where they will be helpful to the main story, but theyre not essential to that story you can read or skip them as you like.

By chance as much as planning mostly because it took over ten years to write Arrival has arrived in the sesquicentennial year, Canadas 150th birthday. Thats appropriate, because much of its about Canadas last big birthday, the energies that coalesced around the Centennial of 1967. But its not for that Canada, or those people (partly because Im not one of them I wasnt alive when much of this story takes place, and Im not old enough to have read any of its writers at that time). This book is about the past, but like all such books, its for the present, a book that I hope helps explain how we got from there to here, from a country without a literature to a literature without a country.

N.M.