Hugh MacLennan
John Hugh MacLennan (March 20, 1907 - November 7, 1990) was a Canadian author and Professor of English at McGill University. He won five Governor-General's Awards and the Royal Bank Award.
MacLennan was born in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, and moved with his family to Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1914. He was educated at Dalhousie University, Oxford University and Princeton University before accepting a teaching position at Lower Canada College in Montreal, Quebec. He married Dorothy Duncan in 1936.
He wrote two unpublished novels before Barometer Rising, his novel about the social class structure of Nova Scotia and the Halifax Explosion of 1917, was published in 1941. His most famous novel, Two Solitudes, a literary allegory for the tensions between English and French Canada, followed in 1945. That year, he left Lower Canada College to pursue writing full-time. Two Solitudes won McLennan his first Governor General's Award for Fiction.
In 1948, MacLennan published The Precipice, which again won the Governor General's Award. The following year, he published an essay collection, Cross Country, which won the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction.
In 1951, MacLennan returned to teaching, accepting a position at McGill University. In 1954, he published another essay collection, Thirty and Three, which again won the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction. One of MacLennan's most notable students at McGill was Marian Engel, who became a noted Canadian novelist in the 1970s.
Duncan died in 1957. MacLennan married his second wife, Aline Walker, in 1959.
That same year, he published The Watch That Ends the Night, which won his final Governor General's Award.
MacLennan continued to write and publish work, with his final novel Voice in Time appearing in 1980. He passed away in 1990.
The Canadian band The Tragically Hip, on their album Fully Completely, have a song called "'Courage (for Hugh MacLennan)."
