Novelist and short-story writer Morley Callaghan, in the view of many, is Canada's most distinguished writer. He is unquestionably the first to have established a major international reputation, which he started building in the late 1920s in the little magazines of Paris and the slick monthlies of New York where his first short stories appeared. A brief participant in the Lost Generation scene in Paris during the late 1920s, Callaghan returned home to Toronto where he has remained, writing long after his famous contemporaries had died or ceased to be productive.

Writing in a direct, unadorned language from a nonjudgmental point of view, Callaghan has often dealt with the struggle of flawed but noble individuals to make it in a hostile or indifferent world. Although some critics have likened his approach to Hemingway's, Brandon Conron, in his 1966 Morley Callaghan, notes this difference: "Moral rather than physical courage is...