Later Novels
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. Two Solitudes won MacLennan 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 a collection of essays, 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 students at McGill was Marian Engel, who became a noted Canadian novelist in the 1970s. Another notable student was Leonard Cohen, the popular songwriter, poet and novelist.
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.
In 1967, he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada. In 1985 he was made a Knight of the National Order of Quebec.
MacLennan continued to write and publish work, with his final novel Voices in Time appearing in 1980. He died in Montreal, Quebec.
The Canadian band The Tragically Hip, on their album Fully Completely, have a song called "Courage (for Hugh MacLennan)". A passage from The Watch That Ends the Night is adapted for use in the song.
Read more about this topic: Hugh MacLennan
Famous quotes containing the word novels:
“The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programmes, or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“Fathers and Sons is not only the best of Turgenev’s novels, it is one of the most brilliant novels of the nineteenth century. Turgenev managed to do what he intended to do, to create a male character, a young Russian, who would affirm his—that character’s—absence of introspection and at the same time would not be a journalist’s dummy of the socialistic type.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)