How the West Was Written is published to celebrate the centenary of James H. Gray's birth. He was born on 31 August 1906.
James H. Gray was the first Canadian social historian to tackle such previously taboo subjects as the sex lives and boozing habits of the early settlers. His books were on the national and Toronto Star bestseller lists before those of Pierre Berton and have since become classics of Canadian literature. Gray's Red Lights on the Prairies stunned readers with its straight-forward approach to prostitution on the prairies and was named one of the one hundred most important Canadian books of all time by the Literary Review of Canada.
Brian Brennan traces Gray’s life from his early years to his prolific late-period career as a social historian who produced an impressive, entertaining series of books about prairie life during the first half of the twentieth century.
Brennan draws on information gleaned from interviews with Gray family members and associates, from such well-known Gray books of the 1960s and 1970s as The Winter Years, Men Against the Desert,The Boy from Winnipeg, Red Lights on the Prairies, and Booze, from Gray’s newspaper articles, and from his research papers, correspondence and diaries. Brennan covers the Gray story with engaging wit and impressive authority.
Brennan covers aspects of the Gray story including:
- His early, poverty-stricken years during WWI in Winnipeg.
- His working career as an office boy, brokerage firm employee and budding entrepreneur and gambler who invested in racehorses, a candy business that went broke, and a miniature golf course.
- His 12-year career with the Free Press where he “could write like hell and was afraid of no one,” which ended abruptly when he became the “only reporter in history to be fired as a result of policy disagreement with his editor”.
- How he accepted a public relations job at Home Oil to promote a Canadian pipeline project and, when that project evaporated, redirected his energies into writing best-selling histories that produced sales of 400,000 and brought the high-school dropout three honorary doctorates, the Order of Canada, and the Pierre Berton Award for distinguished achievement in popularizing Canadian history.
"an engaging biography, rich in personal detail and insight. Gray would have liked this book."
-- Bill Waiser
Reviews:
"Brennan crafts a rich portrait of a man fiercely independent and unafraid to state his opinions. . . Gray's life unfolds with vigour in this deftly written first biography."
-- Western Standard (Calgary)
"Without a doubt, this will remain the definitive biography of a major Canadian popular historian."
-- Fast Forward weekly
"A very readable biography. . . It is a tribute to Brennan's book that he makes us want to go back and read Gray himself."
-- The Literary Review of Canada
"A light and funny book that tells the story of a maverick who first tackled subjects such as the drinking habits and sexcapades of the West's earliest settlers."
-- Calgary Herald
Click here
to see a photo of the typewriter that James Gray used to write his books.
Brian Brennan is an award-winning and best-selling author who specializes in books about the colourful personalities and the social history of Western Canada. His recent titles include Romancing the Rockies: Mountaineers, Missionaries, Marilyn & More, a finalist in the 2005 Banff Mountain Book Competition, and Scoundrels and Scallywags Characters from Alberta’s Past, a finalist for the 2003 Grant MacEwan Author’s Award.
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