John Hugh MacLennan CC CQ FRSL FRSC (March 20, 1907 – November 9, 1990) was a Canadian writer and professor of English at McGill University.

[1] His parents were Samuel MacLennan, a colliery physician, and Katherine MacQuarrie; Hugh also had an older sister named Frances.

[1] Samuel was a stern Calvinist, while Katherine was creative, warm and dreamy, and both parents would be large influences on Hugh's character.

[4] From the ages of twelve to twenty-one, he slept in a tent in the family's backyard, even in the cold winter, possibly as an escape from his strict father.

[10] In his first year at the university's Oriel College,[11] MacLennan worked incredibly hard at his classics courses, but was only able to achieve second-class honours.

[16] MacLennan's four years in Oxford gave him the opportunity to travel throughout Europe, and he visited countries such as Switzerland, France, Greece, and Italy.

[18] His travels and his exposure to different political ideas caused MacLennan to begin to question his father's puritanical, conservative attitudes that he had until then taken for granted.

[27] In spring 1935, he finished his PhD thesis, Oxyrhynchus: An Economic and Social Study, about the decline of a Roman colony in Egypt,[28] which was published by Princeton University Press and reprinted in 1968 by A.M.

[20] He took a position at Lower Canada College in Montreal, Quebec, even though he felt it was beneath him, as just his Dalhousie BA would have been a sufficient qualification for the job.

[30] He generally did not enjoy working there, and resented the long hours required of him for low pay, but was nonetheless a stimulating teacher, at least for the brighter students.

[31] MacLennan would later poke fun at Lower Canada College in his depiction of Waterloo School in The Watch That Ends the Night.

[36] For several months after his father's death MacLennan continued to write letters to him, in which he discussed his thoughts on the possibility and implications of a war in Europe.

[37] Dorothy convinced MacLennan that the failure of his first two novels was due to his having set one in Europe and the other in the United States; she persuaded him to write about Canada, the country he knew best.

"[38] Until then there had been a sporadic tradition of Anglo-Canadian literature, with such writers as Thomas Chandler Haliburton (1796–1865), Susanna Moodie (1803-1885), L. M. Montgomery (1874-1942), Stephen Leacock (1869-1944), Morley Callaghan (1903 – 1990), and W. O. Mitchell (1914-1998).