A member of the same intellectual generation as Harold Innis, Northrop Frye, and George Grant, Donald Creighton (1902–1979) was English Canada’s first great historian. The author of eleven books, including The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence and a two-volume biography of John A. Macdonald, Creighton wrote history as if it “had happened,” he said, “the day before yesterday.” And as a public intellectual, he advised the prime minister of Canada, the premier of Ontario, and – at least on one occasion – the British government.

Yet he was, as Donald Wright shows, also profoundly out of step with his times. As the nation was re-imagined along bilingual and later multicultural lines in the 1960s and 1970s, Creighton defended a British definition of Canada at the same time as he began to fear that he would be remembered only “as a pessimist, a bigot, and a violent Tory partisan.”

Through his virtuoso research into Creighton’s own voluminous papers, Wright paints a sensitive portrait of a brilliant but difficult man. Ultimately, Donald Creighton captures the twentieth-century transformation of English Canada through the life and times of one of its leading intellectuals.

Donald Wright is an assistant professor in the Department of History and the Centre for Canadian Studies at Brock University.

Donald A. Wright's profile page

• Winner, Ontario Historical Society's Donald Creighton Award for biography
• Short-listed, Canada Prize in the Humanities and Social Sciences

‘Donald Wright has provided an admirably full and balanced account of the historian and the man… A powerful study of high art, flawed humanity, and the vicissitudes of reputation.’

Canadian Historical Review vol 97:03:2016

’Donald Creighton is a beautifully written biography, easily the most ambitious biography I have read in a number of years. And its attention to the psychology of the man, to the whole personality and life of its subject, is commendable.’

Acadiensis , vol 45:01:2016

‘Wright very self-consciously places his own biography within the romantic conventions of Creightonian history and romantic art, very appropriately joining together these two heroes. The great Canadian historian created the first hero; his biographer has created the second.’

Historical Studies in Education Spring 2016

‘Wright gives Creighton his due as an undeniably salient figure in Canada’s intellectual history. In the process, he has created an invaluable guide for anyone who seeks to read and to understand Canada’s preeminent historian.’

Canada's History December 2016- January 2017

‘Wright has not only written the definitive biography of one of Canada’s most important historians but provided us with a model of how a biography ought to be done.’

The Dorchester Review Autumn/Winter 2015