Donald Creighton is Canada's best-known and most influential historian, and much of his influence lies in the fact that he always considered history--and biography, in which he has also excelled--to be among the literary arts. Facts are their material, but in both kinds of writing, as Creighton saw them, the imagination must play over the facts and transform them in such a way that the outlines of a country's history or a man's life emerge as clearly as the theme of a novel or the composition of a painting. This attitude has made Creighton at once influential and controversial, since he dealt, essentially, in national myths.

Donald Grant Creighton, the son of William Black Creighton, an editor, and Laura Harvie Creighton, was born in Toronto in 1902, and Upper Canada shaped the attitudes and values he expressed throughout the rest of his life. Suspicious of Quebec's desire for autonomy...