Unpublished Novels
At Princeton, MacLennan wrote his first novel, So All Their Praises. He found one publisher who was willing to take the manuscript, as long as he made certain changes; however, this company went out of business before the book could be published. In spring 1935, he finished his PhD thesis, Oxyrhynchus: An Economic and Social Study, about the decline of a Roman colony in Egypt, which was published by Princeton University Press and reprinted in 1968 by A.M. Hakkert.
In 1935, there were very few teaching jobs available as a result of the Depression, and MacLennan's field of study, the Classics, was in particular becoming less significant in North American education. He took a position at Lower Canada College in Montreal, even though he felt it was beneath him, as just his Dalhousie BA would have been a sufficient qualification for the job. He generally did not enjoy working there, and resented the long hours required of him for low pay, but was nonetheless a stimulating teacher, at least for the brighter students. MacLennan would later poke fun at Lower Canada College in his depiction of Waterloo School in The Watch That Ends the Night. On June 22, 1936, he and Dorothy were wed near her home in Wilmette, Illinois, and settled in Montreal.
Meanwhile, in 1934–1938, MacLennan was working on his second novel, A Man Should Rejoice. Longman, Green and Company and Duell, Sloan and Pearce both showed strong interest in the novel, but in the end neither published it.
In February 1939, MacLennan's father died after suffering from high blood pressure. It was a huge shock to MacLennan, as in the previous year they had just begun to become closer and to reconcile their opposing views. For several months after his father's death MacLennan continued to write letters to him, in which he discussed his thoughts on the possibility and implications of a war in Europe.
Read more about this topic: Hugh MacLennan
Famous quotes containing the words unpublished and/or novels:
“The true colour of life is the colour of the body, the colour of the covered red, the implicit and not explicit red of the living heart and the pulses. It is the modest colour of the unpublished blood.”
—Alice Meynell (1847–1922)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)