When Canadian Literature Moved to New York

R. Gordon Moyles is professor emeritus of English at the University of
Alberta. He is co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities:
British Views of Canada, 1880–1914, author of The Salvation Army and
the Public, and editor of “Improved by Cult

Look through the pages of almost any major American literary or domestic
magazine of the late 19th century—Saturday Evening Post, Literary
Digest, Youth’s Companion, Ladies’ Home Journal, The Bookman—and
you will find their names—William Carman, Charles G.D. Roberts, Frank
Pollock, Archibald Lampman, Arthur Stringer, Ethelwyn Wetherald, Sir
Gilbert Parker, Ernest Thomson Seton, Sara Jeannette Duncan, and Norman
Duncan. Canadians all, whose hearts might have been in the backwoods of
New Brunswick or the forest glades on Ontario, but whose vocations as
poets, novelists, and short-story writers compelled them to make their
names living in what was then the artistic centre of the world, New
York.

In this excellent study of our early expatriates, meticulously
researched and swell written, Nick Mount chronicles the careers of
dozens of post-Confederation writers who found literary success in the
magazines and publishing houses of “the Big Apple.” He shows
also—and this is important to an understanding of our national
literature—that they did not thereby relinquish their Canadianness,
but gained for it a recognition beyond the narrow confines of Canada
while also kindling a nationalistic sentiment back home by what they
wrote and published (and helped other Canadian writers to publish) in
New York. It is a fascinating study that should be read by every student
of our literary foundations. For without the New York
opportunities—indeed, without an American audience—it is doubtful if
we would have had a national literature at all.