Even at the peak of his success, when North of Fifty-Three (1914) was building toward sales of 340,000 copies in reprint and Little, Brown was offering a substantial contract for a novel a year, Bertrand Sinclair pined for a literary reputation. He was torn between writing for the market in order to pay his bills and writing the novel of social analysis that his intelligence and interests demanded. Ultimately an urgent need for cash won out (as it often does in his novels), and his passion for thoughtful fiction was repeatedly compromised by the market's demand for "rip-roaring adventure, the utmost conventionality in point of view [and] a liberal garnishing of sentimental slush," as he wrote to Alfred R. McIntyre on 8 February 1921. The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature (1983) and The Canadian Encyclopedia (1988) do not mention him, nor does W. J. Keith's Canadian Literature in English (1985) or W. H. New's A...