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Long before the recommendations of the Massey Report (1948-49), the introduction of the New Canadian Library (1958), and the prolifera- tion of university courses on Canadian literature, a long forgotten school- teacher named Margaret Cowie was at work teaching it in her Vancouver classroom and assembling a library of Canadian literature for her school. Although the library itself has disappeared, the surprising list of titles collected by Miss Cowie, as well as the lively literary correspondence she left behind in fonds at the University of British Columbia, provides a remarkable snapshot of literary activity in Canada in the 1920s and 1930s. Morley Callaghan, Frederick Phillip Grove, A. M. Klein, Raymond Knister, Dorothy Livesay, Stephen Leacock, Mazo de la Roche, F. R. Scott, and Jes- sie Georgina Sime comprise a small star system of writers typically called upon by present-day university curricula to represent Canadian writing in this era. In spectacular contrast, the eighty-three Canadian writers with whom Cowie corresponded comprise a significantly larger universe of Canadian print culture in the process of expanding, stimulated by a grow- ing reading public, modernizing media, and emerging middlebrow tastes.
Many of these writers shaped the terrain of writing in Canada before the canon, and more than a few published whole series of books that now languish in obscurity despite achieving varying levels of national literary celebrity and prestige in their time. Their correspondence and careers offer refreshing insights into the literary history of Canada during this period and connect Canadian cultural activity to a broader cultural history of the interwar period. Scholars of modernity have characterized the period between the wars as an epoch of major cultural transition. Ben Singer, for instance, considers it a "striking explosion" of industrialization, urbaniza- tion, transportation, migration, mass communication, amusement, and consumerism (19). Yet literary histories have characterized the 1920s and 1930s in Canada as barren, insular, and lacking in literary talent. The few works that have secured a place in the canon reveal the way retrospectives of the period overemphasize the impact of literary modernism, national- ism, or politicized narratives of the Depression at the expense of other kinds of texts and authors widely read in their own time.
Cowie's expansive cast of literary correspondents worked actively throughout the Depression and...