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Donald Creighton: A Life in History
A member of the same intellectual generation as Harold Innis, Northrop Frye, and George Grant, Donald Creighton (1902-1979) was English Canada's first great historian. The author of eleven books, including The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence and a two-volume biography of John A. Macdonald, Creighton wrote history as if it "had happened," he said, "the day before yesterday." And as a public intellectual, he advised the prime minister of Canada, the premier of Ontario, and - at least on one occasion - the British government. Yet he was, as Donald Wright shows, also profoundly out of step with his times. As the nation was re-imagined along bilingual and later multicultural lines in the 1960s and 1970s, Creighton defended a British definition of Canada at the same time as he began to fear that he would be remembered only "as a pessimist, a bigot, and a violent Tory partisan." Through his virtuoso research into Creighton's own voluminous papers, Wright paints a sensitive portrait of a brilliant but difficult man. Ultimately, Donald Creighton captures the twentieth-century transformation of English Canada through the life and times of one of its leading intellectuals.
496 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2015
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November 23, 2025
Wright I think as a historian is terrible, but as a biographer, this is his best work
Think of Creighton as someone with Diefenbaker's brain in a jar
Think of Donald Wright as someone with Justin Trudeau's brain in a jar
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For all its grandeur and significance, however, the Laurentian thesis got many things very wrong. Creighton’s narrative, Wright emphatically argues, simply erased many important groups, most notably the Aboriginal peoples who just happened to already occupy this “great lone land.”
Nor is there much room in the Creightonian canon for women, French Canadians, or members of the emerging working class.
His thesis was also, like the Protestant Bible, a decidedly teleological construction. The end of the story — the Canadian nation state — was prefigured in the beginning, embedded in the Great River and Laurentian Shield. It fell to the businessmen and politicians to bring the course of history to its proper and predetermined conclusion.
The final section of the biography, “Winter,” is at once provocative and compelling, and the interplay between scholarship and depression takes a new turn. By the mid-1960s, Creighton was becoming increasingly distraught and upon his life and work grim melancholy sat.
He now asserted that the Empire of the St Lawrence had failed and that “he had wasted his time writing the history of an ungrateful country”.
He translated this sense of gloom into his great book, Canada’s First Century, in which he turned the story of Canada on its head.
The epic saga of nation-building had become a tragedy. Canada’s first century would be its last.
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think of Creighton as believing that Canada started to die after 100 years as a nation
and people like Wright believes in all those bizarre views of Iglooland as the first 'Post National State', and all that malarkey
Think of Creighton as someone with Diefenbaker's brain in a jar
Think of Donald Wright as someone with Justin Trudeau's brain in a jar
///////
For all its grandeur and significance, however, the Laurentian thesis got many things very wrong. Creighton’s narrative, Wright emphatically argues, simply erased many important groups, most notably the Aboriginal peoples who just happened to already occupy this “great lone land.”
Nor is there much room in the Creightonian canon for women, French Canadians, or members of the emerging working class.
His thesis was also, like the Protestant Bible, a decidedly teleological construction. The end of the story — the Canadian nation state — was prefigured in the beginning, embedded in the Great River and Laurentian Shield. It fell to the businessmen and politicians to bring the course of history to its proper and predetermined conclusion.
The final section of the biography, “Winter,” is at once provocative and compelling, and the interplay between scholarship and depression takes a new turn. By the mid-1960s, Creighton was becoming increasingly distraught and upon his life and work grim melancholy sat.
He now asserted that the Empire of the St Lawrence had failed and that “he had wasted his time writing the history of an ungrateful country”.
He translated this sense of gloom into his great book, Canada’s First Century, in which he turned the story of Canada on its head.
The epic saga of nation-building had become a tragedy. Canada’s first century would be its last.
/////////
think of Creighton as believing that Canada started to die after 100 years as a nation
and people like Wright believes in all those bizarre views of Iglooland as the first 'Post National State', and all that malarkey
Displaying 1 of 1 review