SOURCE: Pell, Barbara. “Morley Callaghan.” In Faith and Fiction: A Theological Critique of the Narrative Strategies of Hugh MacLennan and Morley Callaghan, pp. 65-73. Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Pell delineates the defining characteristics of Callaghan's fiction.

Although he did not share MacLennan's nationalistic vocation to define this country in fiction, Morley Callaghan was arguably the other most important founding father of the modern Canadian novel. One of Canada's most prolific writers for over sixty years, he produced in that time sixteen novels, five books of short stories and novellas, a book of memoirs, a couple of plays, and innumerable articles. He was also a major religious novelist, for the distinctive and personal view of life which characterized all of his writings was based on a religious view of humanity in God's world. In a time of rapidly changing social mores and perspectives...