For a Working-Class Culture in Canada: A Selection of Colin Mackay's Writings on Sociology and Political Economy, 1897-1938

by Ian McKay, Lewis Jackson

Seafarer, poet, labour activist, short story writer, Christian, philosopher, journalist, political economist, cultural critic and socialist -- Colin McKay (1876-1939) was all of these, a true working-class intellectual.Restless and inquiring, McKay left the South Shore of Nova Scotia as a boy; when he was not at sea, he lived at various times in Montreal, Saint John, Toronto, Glasgow, London, Paris, Halifax and Ottawa. From these centres, he wrote hundreds of articles for the popular press and for literary, political and labour publications. McKay's insights into a broad range of twentieth-century social, economic and cultural issues make a forceful, but until now unrecognized, contribution to Canadian intellectual history.

For a Working-Class Culture in Canada rediscovers this author and his ideas. Ian McKay and Lewis Jackson have gathered more than 125 of Colin McKay's most trenchant essays, and Ian McKay's introduction and annotations set them into their intellectual and social context. Acadiensis Press and the Canadian Committee on Labour History have co-operated to publish this unique document in the history of the Canadian working class.

615 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1996