In 1958 the Massey Commission on Canadian Cultural Policy established the Canada Council, an organization devoted to active encouragement and financial support of artistic endeavors. Canadian writers were published in larger numbers, Canadian theaters opened for Canadian plays and courses in Canadian literature became standard features in universities and high schools. These developments had a direct impact both on the character of Canadian writing and on how it reached readers. The decades following 1959 saw a new generation of writers contending with the particular manifestations of their cultures. The decade of the 1960s was one of militant cultural nationalism; the 1970s saw the fruition of those national commitments; while the 1980s were marked by a wave of economic recession which affected daily life as well as political policy. This first volume in a six volume series on Canadian literary achievement profiles 67 notable writers from this prolific period.
67 entries include: Milton Acorn, Hubert Aquin, Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Marcel Dube, Marian Engel, Diane Giguere, Jacques Hebert, D. G. Jones, Robert Kroetsch, Suzanne Paradis, Scott Symons and Richard B. Wright.