In a Times Colonist review last Sunday, April 22, 2007, Dave Obee states, "Brennan's work might help to bring Gray into the national limelight, something that is long overdue. After that, who knows? Some easterners might decide to read Red Lights on the Prairies. They could do much worse."The sentiment running through Obee's piece is reflective of Christopher Moore's analysis in the February 07 issue of The Beaver, in a feature entitled REREADING JAMES GRAY. Moore states, "Pierre Berton lived in Toronto. James Gray lived in Calgary. When it comes to a national reputation, is geography destiny?" Good question, Christopher Moore.
Brian Brennan is a writer of books and periodical articles about the history and the colourful personalities of Western Canada.
His latest is
How The West Was Written
The Life and Times of James H. Gray
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.
For more about the book and to purchase, see
http://www.fitzhenry.ca/detail.aspx?ID=9912
Foreword
I met James Gray in the spring of 1995. I had just written new introductions to several of his books that were being republished and he wanted to treat me to lunch at Calgary’s Petroleum Club. He was legally blind by then, and I found him holding court at the club entrance, recognizing old friends by their voices and getting caught up on the latest gossip.
Twenty years earlier, as a fresh history student embarking on graduate studies, I would have sniffed at Gray and his work for not being scholarly, not being theoretical enough. After all, academic writing was serious stuff. But, as I gradually learned during my university career, that’s exactly why Gray enjoyed such a popular following. Unlike the monographs produced by most professional historians, his books were deliberately pitched at the general reader. It really was not a fair contest.
Gray turned to writing out of desperation. In a letter in December 1994, prepared on an old typewriter that had become a challenge for him to operate because of his eyesight, he confided to me, “The most important fact to be understood about me is I am a product totally of the Great Depression.” He then went on to explain that in 1931, after “a five-month detour through a T.B. sanatorium,” he and his young family found themselves “utterly destitute on unemployment relief living, eating, sleeping, and cooking in a single room in a slum boarding house.”
It was at this low point that Gray decided to become a journalist. Through sheer persistence, he landed a job as a reporter with the Winnipeg Free Press in 1935. Soon, he was recruited as an editorial writer. But the Depression still haunted him, so in 1946, while working as a member of the Ottawa press gallery, he wrote The Winter Years, a personal account of the dirty thirties in the urban West.
For a number of reasons, the manuscript would not appear in print for another twenty years. But when The Winter Years was finally published in 1966, it was an instant national best-seller. It also marked the beginning—at age sixty when most people start to contemplate retirement—of Gray’s prolific writing career. Over the next twenty-six years, he produced twelve books, many of which have become classics.
Gray’s trademark was an accessible and lucid style, peppered with wit and sarcasm. In Red Lights on the Prairies, he quipped that if Western Canadian historians were to be believed, the West had been settled by “monks, eunuchs, and vestal virgins.” In a similar vein in Men Against the Desert, he observed, “More lies have probably been told about the weather of the Dirty Thirties than any other subject except sex; yet most of the lies could have been true.”
Gray’s other great strength was his ability to tell a good anecdote, to put a human face on events and issues. During the 1960s, at the same time that Gray had become a full-time writer, Canadian historians began to place greater emphasis on social history and the experience of everyday people, including those on the margins of society. Gray was already tilling this ground in his writing. Even though his books may not have been based on some new methodology, or were not heavily documented, he did the necessary primary research and then communicated his findings in clear, compelling prose.
In How the West Was Written, Brian Brennan skilfully examines James Gray’s contribution to Western Canadian history against the larger backdrop of his life, family, and career. The reader not only gains an intimate understanding of Gray—his character and personality, warts and all—but also comes to readily appreciate how and why he became one of Western Canada’s most successful social historians. It is an engaging biography, rich in personal detail and insight. Gray would have liked this book. ---Bill Waiser, August 2006
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
Prologue: Canada’s Highest Honour
Early Years—1906–1922
Down and Out in Winnipeg—1930–1931
Reading and Writing—1931–1934
On to Ottawa—1935
Playing Oliver Twist—1937
Sitting out the Second World War—1939–1945
Ottawa Correspondent—1946–1947
A “Prairie Cassandra”—1947–1955
Adventures in the Oil Patch—1955–1964
The Winter Years—1962–1965
A Prairie Historian Emerges—1966
Men Against the Desert—1965–1969
The Boy from Winnipeg—1969
Red Lights on the Prairies—1971
Booze—1972
Cracking the American Market—1973–1979
The Roar of the Twenties—1975
History in the Schools—1975–1977
Selling the Farm—1977
Troublemaker!—1977–1978
Boomtime—1978–1980
Bacchanalia Revisited—1982
Cowboys and Counsels—1982–1986
The Bennett Project—1986–1991
Final Years—1991–1998
A Note on Sources
Acknowledgements
About Brian Brennan
See Brennan Ink:
The official blog of Brian Brennan, best-selling author and award-winning journalist
http://brianbrennan.blogspot.com/
