1907 John Hugh MacLennan born on 20 March in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, son and second child of Katherine MacQuarrie and Samuel MacLennan, a medical doctor employed by the coal mining industry.
1915 The MacLennan household moves from Cape Breton Island to Halifax where Dr. MacLennan sets up his practice after having been invalided out of service in the First World War.
1917 MacLennan lives through the catastrophe of the Halifax Explosion, which will become the subject of his first published novel, Barometer Rising (1941).
1924 MacLennan graduates from Halifax County Academy with a University Entrance Scholarship and the Yeoman Prize in Latin and Greek. Enrols in Dalhousie University to study Classics, at which he excels.
1928 Having distinguished himself academically and in sports, MacLennan graduates from Dalhousie University, disappointed at not having won the (expected and hoped for) Rhodes Scholarship for Nova Scotia but is then chosen Rhodes Scholar for Canada-at-large. Sails for England and Oxford in September of that year.
1928–32 Once settled in at Oriel College, MacLennan finds his studies in Classics rigorous and demanding. He has little social life other than sports (rugby and tennis, at which he was a champion player at the university); writes frequent letters to his family, and takes advantage of his vacations to travel modestly on the Continent in France, Italy, Austria, and Germany, where he encounters strong right wing nationalism and the rising tides of fascism and communism. Earns his BA in Classics from Oxford in 1932 and wins a Fellowship at Princeton to continue his studies for a Ph.D.
1932 Sailing home from Oxford, meets an American woman, Dorothy Duncan (1903–1957), a writer (Bluenose: A Portrait of Nova Scotia, 1942) as well as a graphic artist, and marries her four years later.
1932–1935 Unable to find suitable employment, MacLennan, offered a modest fellowship at Princeton, decides to study there for his Ph.D in classical history. While at the university he tries his hand at writing fiction, leading to two early novels, both of which remain unpublished. In 1935 receives his doctorate and his dissertation, “Oxyrhynchus: An Economic and Social Study,” is published by Princeton University Press. He moves to Montreal and takes up a position as schoolmaster at Lower Canada College.
1936 Hugh MacLennan and Dorothy Duncan are married on 22 June in Wilmette, Illinois, returning via Boston and Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, to settle in Montreal.
1937–1939 MacLennan struggles unsuccessfully to arrange for the publication of his two novels in manuscript, “A Man Should Rejoice” which is rejected by Random House and “So All Their Praises” which is rejected by Longmans Green, both in New York. He reportedly reads Ringuet’s Trente Arpents, which had appeared in 1938 and without which, MacLennan later confesses, Two Solitudes could not have been written. Predicts that war will begin in September of 1939.
1936–1941 Continues at Lower Canada College and begins to develop a career at writing for magazines. He is prompted by his wife to turn his fiction to Canadian themes. She, having written a guide book, Here’s to Canada! (1941), is embarked on her book Bluenose (1942) and is credited with MacLennan’s choosing the Halifax Explosion of 1917 as the focus of his novel Barometer Rising, which launches his career as a novelist.
1941 Barometer Rising is published and is well received. MacLennan continues to teach at Lower Canada College but feels financially constrained and endeavours to supplement his income by writing for magazines.
1943 MacLennan is awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which provides some financial relief and frees him somewhat to work on his next novel, Two Solitudes, which he had apparently begun the previous year. MacLennan’s declared project is to write a novel of Canadian life in the years 1917–40. Announcement of the fellowship generates a series of letters from American publishers (J.B. Lippincott; Doubleday, Doran; Houghton, Mifflin) expressing interest in publishing his next novel.
1944 MacLennan begins correspondence with Willem L. Graff, professor of German, as he tries to pin down the exact wording and location of the “two solitudes” reference in the work of the German poet Rainer-Maria Rilke. In July he dispatches a copy of the 582 page typescript of Two Solitudes to Blanche Gregory, his literary agent in New York, and the publisher Duell, Sloan and Pearce. A third copy will go to Collins in Toronto, who will publish it in Canada.
1945 Two Solitudes is published (publication date is mid-January although copies had been made available in December of 1944). The book is well received with congratulatory letters from friends and literary associates and excellent reviews and good sales. The success of Two Solitudes and its financial returns enable MacLennan to resign from Lower Canada College, a position that he had never enjoyed. He wins the Governor General’s Award for fiction.
1948 MacLennan publishes The Precipice, which, while it wins the Governor General’s Award for fiction, is not a commercial or critical success.
1949 Cross Country, a collection of ten previously published essays/articles, half of which had appeared in Maclean’s magazine, is published. The collection wins the Governor General’s Award for non-fiction.
1951 With his wife’s health beginning to fail and medical bills becoming a burden (there had even been a suggestion the previous year that he accept financial help from the Canadian Writer’s Foundation), MacLennan accepts a part-time position in the English Department of McGill University, entering the academic profession in which he will remain until his retirement. Each Man’s Son is published in May in spite of paper shortages.
1954 Thirty and Three, MacLennan’s second collection of essays, is published and wins the Governor General’s Award for non-fiction.
1957 Dorothy Duncan, MacLennan’s wife for twenty-one years, dies after a prolonged struggle with chronic illness.
1959 MacLennan marries Frances Aline Walker, known as Tota, who had been a family friend for some years. The Watch that Ends the Night is published and wins MacLennan’s fifth and last Governor General’s Award.
1960 Scotchman’s Return and Other Essays is published.
1964 MacLennan takes a sabbatical leave from McGill and goes to live in Grenoble, France, where he continues writing his next novel and works hard at mastering spoken French.
1966 The Molson Prize, a rich cash award in the second year of its existence, names MacLennan as the recipient of this honour.
1967 Return of the Sphinx is published; MacLennan is inducted as a Companion of the Order of Canada.
1968 Alarmed at the general malaise in society and the militancy of the young – student riots in Paris; a mob marching to demand a “McGill français”; the burning of the computer centre at Sir George Williams University in Montreal – MacLennan retreats into himself to incubate the themes of personal dysfunction and social alienation that become strong and prophetic elements in Voices in Time.
1980 Voices in Time, blurbed as MacLennan’s finest novel, is also his last.
1990 MacLennan dies on 9 November at his country home in North Hatley in the Eastern Townships of Quebec.
Note: MacLennan won many awards and distinctions in his time. He was made a Chevalier of the National Order of Quebec, elected a Fellow of The Royal Society of Canada, and had honorary degrees conferred on him by several Canadian Universities.