The Homesteaders

In The Homesteaders, Stead stresses the importance of pioneer life, its heroic and ideal qualities, as part of a unifying national tradition. It  is valuable as pioneering literary work, part of the slow evolution of Canadian literature from escapist romance to conscious examination of national life.

ROBERT J.C. STEAD (1880-1959) was a Manitoba journalist and sometime poet. He began his career as novelist during World War I, but it was with Neighbours (1922), The Smoking Flax (1924), and especially Grain (1926) that he established his claim to be the pioneer realist of Canadian rural life.

SUSAN WOOD GLICKSOHN is writing a thesis on ‘Man, the Land and Society in English and French Canadian Fiction’ for the English Department of the University of Toronto.