W. L. Mackenzie King (1874-1950) was Canada’s longest-serving, best-known and certainly most unusual prime minister. The keeper of a famous series of candid personal diaries, he is a gift to the biographer. King did not live long enough to write his planned memoirs, and his official biography remains long unfinished. As a result, some 24 biographies of him have been published, with different purposes and from different perspectives. They are a study in extreme contrasts. This is a critical collective history of those works, published between 1922 and 2014.
Volume I of the Mackenzie King Record carried the story of Mackenzie King as wartime Prime Minister of Canada down to mid-1944. When Volume II begins he has just returned from important London meetings of the Commonwealth Prime Ministers during which he had addressed the combined Houses of Parliament at Westminster.
This comprehensive bibliography on William Lyon Mackenzie King, the most prominent Canadian politician in the first half of the twentieth century, will be an invaluable reference tool for researchers in archives and libraries, as well as for political scientists, historians, journalists, and book collectors. In this volume Henderson provides comprehensive lists of books, articles, and other material written by King or about him and his era, and includes a series of appendices relating to studies on King and miscellaneous material pertaining to his life and career. In addition, Henderson provides a list of unsigned articles by King that appeared in newspapers and periodicals, and of sound recordings and motion picture footage relating to him. Finally, he identifies all forewords and prefaces written by King, plays written about him, and books and poems dedicated to him.
The genre of political memoir has a long history, from its origins in classical times through its popularity in the age of courts and cabinets to its ubiquity in modern mass cultures where retired politicians increasingly attract large and eager readerships for their revelations. Yet there is virtually no scholarly criticism which treats this complex form of literature as a distinct genre, fusing autobiographical, historical and political elements. The essays in this book draw together the collaborative findings of a team of British, European, American and Canadian scholars to present a pioneering historical and critical study of the genre of political memoir, analysing the development of its distinct functions and assessing leading memoirists in European, American, Canadian, Indian and Japanese societies. The editor, George Egerton, introduces the volume and surveys the principal features of the genre over its long history. Otto Pflanze analyses the memoirs of Bismarck; Robert Young, Milton Israel, Joshua Mostow and Robert Bothwell study the memoir literature of France, India, Japan and Canada respectively. Barry Gough and Tim Travers look at naval and military memoirists, while Zara Steiner, B.J.C. McKercher and Valerie Cromwell assess the memoirs of diplomats and their families. Leonidas Hill examines the memoirs of leading Nazis. John Munro, Francis Heller and Robert Ferrell convey inside information on the making of memoirs - notably by the Canadian Prime Ministers Diefenbaker and Pearson and the American President Truman. Stephen Ambrose assays Nixon as memoirist, while Janos Bak portrays the status of memoirists under totalitarian regimes. Wesley Wark and John Naylor analyse theproliferation of intelligence memoirs and government efforts to protect official secrets from the revelations of the candid memoirist. The principal findings reached by the contributors in their study of this problematic but influential genre are set out by the editor in the concluding chapter.
When Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King died in 1950, the public knew little about his eccentric private life. In his final will King ordered the destruction of his private diaries, seemingly securing his privacy for good. Yet twenty-five years after King's death, the public was bombarded with stories about "Weird Willie," the prime minister who communed with ghosts and cavorted with prostitutes. Unbuttoned traces the transformation of the public’s knowledge and opinion of King's character, offering a compelling look at the changing way Canadians saw themselves and measured the importance of their leaders’ personal lives. Christopher Dummitt relates the strange posthumous tale of King's diary and details the specific decisions of King's literary executors. Along the way we learn about a thief in the public archives, stolen copies of King's diaries being sold on the black market, and an RCMP hunt for a missing diary linked to the search for Russian spies at the highest levels of the Canadian government. Analyzing writing and reporting about King, Dummitt concludes that the increasingly irreverent views of King can be explained by a fundamental historical transformation that occurred in the era in which King's diaries were released, when the rights revolution, Freud, 1960s activism, and investigative journalism were making self-revelation a cultural preoccupation. Presenting extensive archival research in a captivating narrative, Unbuttoned traces the rise of a political culture that privileged the individual as the ultimate source of truth, and made Canadians rethink what they wanted to know about politicians.
'Dead men', they say, 'tell the most interesting tales'. In Mackenzie King's case that is certainly true. While he did not write his own life story because time simply ran out, he did leave behind his extensive diaries and personal letters which are an author's dream come true. Many writers accessed this material with the result that more has been written about King than about any other Canadian Prime Minister. The primary interest was in him as a politician and, as a result, the personal side of his life was either neglected or used to ridicule his memory. You need only mention his name and you are told of his intense love for his mother, of his interest in spiritualism (to the extent of 'talking' to the departed, including his little dogs) and then there were the reconstructed 'ruins' at his summer house in Kingsmere. It does not go much deeper than that. What might have been learned about King's personal life had he written his autobiography? At one time he had considered doing this saying, '[I] should write my own memoirs when the right time comes, not lay bare my soul before others.' Had he written, it would surely have been a heavily censored story. It is difficult to think that he would have told the reader of his storms of passion or details of his sessions at the 'little table'. This book, Mackenzie King: Friends & Lovers, takes the reader into its confidence, introducing first his family background, then his closest friends, male and female. As well, there is a chapter on his association with the various Governors-General of Canada from 1900 to 1950. Yes, knowing King's life story as we now do, it would be interesting to learn how he would have written about it. Spiritualism seems to be on the decline but has anyone consulted the weegieboard recently?
