Edited by author 06-17-2004 11:11 AM
Dana Cook collects literary remembrances of the father of CanLit Jack McClelland.

(Read original essay here)



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More McClelland Encomium

Though linking to Macleans makes my teeth ache... I guess it's a step up from USA Today...

Known as "Jake" to his wartime naval buddies, McClelland risked his life captaining a torpedo boat in the English Channel. "I lived every day as if it was the last," he once said. "I had fun all the bloody time." The appetites for danger and fun never left him. In the staid world of Canadian publishing, McClelland's tolerance for risk was unheard of. He didn't merely raise the industry's temperature -- he changed its climate. Taking command of M&S from his teetotaller father in 1952, the charming, golden-haired, chain-smoking heir revolutionized it, launching authors' careers on oceans of liquor. He transformed the cozily self-styled "Home of Good Books" (largely imported) into "The Canadian Publishers."



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From Quill and Quire:

Here’s one of the more curious pieces to appear following Jack McClelland’s death last week: on the Bookninja.com site, Dana Cook – “a Toronto freelance editor, indexer and collector of literary encounters” – has compiled references to McClelland that appeared in half a dozen literary memoirs, by the likes of William Weintraub, Matt Cohen, and Phyllis Grosskurth. No mention, though, of the entire books that are devoted to McClelland, including James King’s biography Jack: A Life with Writers (Knopf Canada, 1999) and the Sam Solecki-edited Imagining Canadian Literature: The Selected Letters of Jack McClelland (Key Porter Books, 1998). Watch for Q&Q’s own McClelland tribute in our August issue.

Jack's Pull

You know you had an impact when a Leonard Cohen comes down from the mountain to praise you.



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