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5 - Psychological Realism, Immigration, and City Fiction: Morley Callaghan, “Last Spring They Came Over” (1927)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 April 2017

Paul Goetsch
Affiliation:
University of Freiburg, Germany
Reingard M. Nischik
Affiliation:
Reingard M. Nischik is Professor and chair of American literature at the University of Constance, Germany.
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Summary

Morley Callaghan (1903–90) WAS BORN in Toronto to Roman Catholic parents of Irish descent. He attended St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto and the Osgoode Hall Law School. Beginning in 1923, he worked for The Toronto Daily Star as a reporter. There he met Ernest Hemingway, who encouraged him to become a writer. While Hemingway, who was five years his senior, left for Europe at the end of 1923 and embarked upon the first important phase of his career, Callaghan continued with his studies, yet also started to publish stories in avant-garde magazines such as transition and This Quarter, as well as in more popular periodicals such as Scribner's Magazine. In 1928 the New York editor Max Perkins accepted for publication Callaghan's first novel Strange Fugitive (1928) and his first collection of stories, A Native Argosy (1929). After graduation from law school and admission to the Ontario bar, Callaghan — who never practiced as a lawyer — went to Paris in April 1929, at this time the center of the literary and artistic world of the so-called lost generation. There he met Hemingway again and became associated with F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and other well-known writers. As he related much later in That Summer in Paris (1963), he became somewhat disillusioned as the artists’ and writers’ jealousies, rivalries, and gossip seemed to reduce Paris to a “small town”: “If I didn't want the French culture, then I was there in exile. Could the dream I had for years of being in Paris have been only a necessary fantasy . . . to give me some satisfactory view of myself?” (Callaghan in Morley 1978, 9). He returned to Toronto in the fall of 1929 and became a full-time writer; he also worked for CBC radio and as a columnist for New World Magazine. Callaghan wrote eight novels, of which Such Is My Beloved (1934), They Shall Inherit the Earth (1935), The Loved and the Lost (1951), and The Many Coloured Coat (1960) are generally considered to be the best. Several of his short stories were reprinted by Edna O'Brien and Martha Foley in their annual edition of The Best American Short Stories. Callaghan's reputation as a short-story writer was enhanced by his story collections A Native Argosy (1929), Now That April's Here (1936), Morley Callaghan's Stories (1959), and The Lost and Found Stories of Morley Callaghan (1985).

Type
Chapter
Information
The Canadian Short Story
Interpretations
, pp. 95 - 104
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2007

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