Although more absorbed with questions of philosophy, religion, and politics than the literature, George Grant has had a considerable and continuing impact on literary and cultural nationalists in English-speaking Canada. It is necessary to insist on the adjective English-speaking, for it is one that Grant himself is careful to use, in recognition of the fact that developments in Quebec lie largely outside his domain. The result is that Grant's writing is either unknown or mistrusted by the majority of contemporary Francophone writers and critics, while even among Anglophone Canadian Grant's elegant and lucid conservatism provokes wide extremes of respect and scorn. Therefore no discussion of Grant's place in Canadian letters can be free of controversy.

George Parkin Grant, the son of William Lawson and Maude Parkin Grant, was born and raised in Toronto. He spent his undergraduate years at Queen's University (B. A., 1939) and then went to Oxford...