A member of the same intellectual generation as Harold Innis, Northrop Frye, and George Grant, Donald Creighton (1902-1979) was English Canada's first great historian. The author of eleven books, including The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence and a two-volume biography of John A. Macdonald, Creighton wrote history as if it "had happened," he said, "the day before yesterday." And as a public intellectual, he advised the prime minister of Canada, the premier of Ontario, and - at least on one occasion - the British government. Yet he was, as Donald Wright shows, also profoundly out of step with his times. As the nation was re-imagined along bilingual and later multicultural lines in the 1960s and 1970s, Creighton defended a British definition of Canada at the same time as he began to fear that he would be remembered only "as a pessimist, a bigot, and a violent Tory partisan." Through his virtuoso research into Creighton's own voluminous papers, Wright paints a sensitive portrait of a brilliant but difficult man. Ultimately, Donald Creighton captures the twentieth-century transformation of English Canada through the life and times of one of its leading intellectuals.
- ISBN10 144264947X
- ISBN13 9781442649477
- Publish Date 6 August 2015 (first published 5 August 2015)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country CA
- Imprint University of Toronto Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 496
- Language English