Hugh Hood Biography

Canadian novelist and short-story writer, born to English and French-Canadian parents in Toronto, educated at the University of Toronto. He became a professor of English in Connecticut and Montreal. His Catholicism informs his fiction, which habitually investigates issues of conscience and moral dualities. He first achieved recognition for a volume of Montreal sketches, Around the Mountain (1967). Subsequent short-story volumes include The Fruit Man, the Meat Man and the Manager (1971), Dark Glasses (1976), None Genuine without This Signature (1980), August Nights (1985), A Short Walk in the Rain (1989), The Isolation Booth (1991), and You'll Catch Your Death (1992). Hood's novels include White Figure, White Ground (1964); The Camera Always Lies (1967), set in the film world; A Game of Touch (1970); and You Can't Get There from Here (1972), a satirical novel set in a fictional African country whose two peoples evoke the cultural divisions between anglophone and francophone Canadians. His most ambitious work is his ‘New Age’ cycle, a projected series of twelve novels, which began with The Swing in the Garden (1975). By focusing on a particular protagonist and family, it aims to provide a viewpoint on moral and social issues from the 1880s to the year 2000, and continued with A New Athens (1977), Reservoir Ravine (1979), Black and White Keys (1982), The Scenic Art (1984), The Motor Boys in Ottawa (1986), Tony's Book (1988), and Property and Value (1990). He has also published a collection of literary and cultural essays, Unsupported Assertions (1991).