Morley Callaghan

Edward Morley Callaghan (February 22 1903 -- August 25 1990) was a Canadian novelist, short story writer, playwright, television and radio personality.

Of Irish parentage, Callaghan was born and raised in Toronto. He was educated at Riverdale Collegiate Institute, the University of Toronto and Osgoode Hall Law School, though he never practised law. During the 1920s he worked at the Toronto Daily Star where he became friends with fellow reporter, Ernest Hemingway, formerly of The Kansas City Star. Callaghan began writing stories that were well received and soon was recognized as one of the best short story writers of the day. In 1929 he spent some months in Paris, where he was part of the great gathering of writers in Montparnasse that included Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Joyce.

He recalled this time in his 1963 memoir That Summer in Paris. In the book, he discusses the infamous boxing match between himself and Hemingway wherein Callaghan took up Hemingway's challenge to a bout. While in Paris, the pair had been regular sparring partners at the American Club of Paris. Being a better boxer, Callaghan knocked Hemingway to the mat. The blame was centred on referee F. Scott Fitzgerald's lack of attention on the stop-watch as he let the boxing round go past its regulation three minutes. An infuriated Hemingway was angry at Fitzgerald. Hemingway and Fitzgerald had an often caustic relationship and Hemingway was convinced that Fitzgerald let the round go longer than normal in order to see Hemingway humiliated by Callaghan.

Callaghan's novels and short stories are marked by undertones of Roman Catholicism, often focusing on individuals whose essential characteristic is a strong but often weakened sense of self. His first novels were Strange Fugitive (1928), a number of short stories, novellas and novels followed. Callaghan published little between 1937 and 1950. However, during these years, many non-fiction articles were written in various periodicals such as New World (Toronto), and National Home Monthly.

Luke Baldwin's Vow, a slim novel about a boy and his dog, was originally published in a 1947 edition of Saturday Evening Post and soon became a juvenile classic read in school rooms around the world. The Loved and the Lost (1951) won the Governor General's Award. Callaghan's later works include, among others, The Many Coloured Coat (1960), A Passion in Rome (1961), A Fine and Private Place (1975), A Time for Judas (1983), Our Lady of the Snows (1985). His last novel was A Wild Old Man Down the Road (1988). Publications of short stories have appeared in The Lost and Found Stories of Morley Callaghan (1985), and in The New Yorker Stories (2001). The four-volume The Complete Stories (2003) collects for the first time 90 of his stories.

Callaghan was awarded the Royal Society of Canada's Lorne Pierce Medal in 1960. In 1982 he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada.

He married Loretto Dee, with whom he had two sons: Michael (born November 1931) and Barry (born 1937), a poet and author in his own right. Barry Callaghan's memoir Barrelhouse Kings (1998), examines his career and that of his father. After outliving most of his contemporaries, Callaghan died after a brief illness in Toronto at the age of 87.