A Literary Life: 1928-1990

Morley Callaghan, born in 1903, was not just a prolific writer of fiction (he published many novels, a memoir, and four volumes of short stories), but all his life he wrote essays about other writers – starting in the Twenties with Virginia Woolf, Dos Passos, Thomas Mann, and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Then, in a kind of “table talk,” he commented through magazines, newspapers, CBC Radio and TV on everything from war propoganda to Homburg hats. Into his final decades, he wrote on Solzhenitsyn and Marquez, meditations on our Winter and on Failure, always dealing with complex matters in his graceful, conversational prose. Here, brought together for the first time, a selection of these masterful reflections on writing, and the writer’s life.

“Over sixty years as the master story-teller, the master of belles lettres.”