Gwethalyn Graham (January 18, 1913 – November 25, 1965) was a Canadian writer and activist, whose 1944 novel Earth and High Heaven was the first Canadian book to reach number one on the New York Times Best Seller list.^[1] Graham won the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction twice, for her first novel Swiss Sonata in 1938,^[2] and for Earth and High Heaven in 1944.^[1]

Background

She was born Gwethalyn Graham Erichsen-Brown, to wealthy Toronto parents. Her father was a lawyer. At 19, she was a student at Smith College in Massachusetts, but dropped out and eloped with John McNaught, the son of her father's business partner.^[1] They divorced after two years, and Graham moved to the city of Westmount on the island of Montreal, where she became a close friend and associate of Hugh MacLennan, F. R. Scott, Thérèse Casgrain and Pierre Trudeau. Graham subsequently married David Yalden-Thomson, a philosophy professor at McGill University; they subsequently also divorced.^[1]

Graham's sister, Isabel LeBourdais, was a journalist whose 1966 book The Trial of Steven Truscott played a key role in disputing the evidence that led to Steven Truscott's controversial murder conviction,^[3] and her brother John Erichsen-Brown was a diplomat with the Canadian Department of External Affairs.^[4]

Career

She wrote two abandoned early novels^[1] before completing Swiss Sonata, which was published in 1938.^[5]

Graham was also an outspoken activist against anti-Semitism and anti-French Canadian discrimination;^[6] Earth and High Heaven depicted an interfaith romance between a Protestant woman from Montreal and a Jewish man from Northern Ontario.^[7] The novel was optioned by Samuel Goldwyn for a film that was to star Katharine Hepburn;^[8] however, the film was never made, as Goldwyn abandoned the project after the similarly themed Gentleman's Agreement came out while Earth and High Heaven was still in development.^[1]

Graham's only published book after Earth and High Heaven was Dear Enemies, a non-fiction collection of her correspondence with journalist Solange Chaput-Rolland about English-French relations in Canada.^[1] She had postponed her planned third novel to work on the book.^[1] She also wrote a theatrical play, Trouble at Weti,^[9] and radio plays for CBC Radio,^[1] and translated works by writers from Quebec, most notably André Laurendeau's play Two Terrible Women (Deux femmes terribles), into English.^[1]

Graham died in 1965 of an undiagnosed brain tumour, aged 52.^[1] Her illness and death resulted in the cancellation of a planned sequel to Dear Enemies.^[1]

Both Swiss Sonata and Earth and High Heaven were reissued by Cormorant Books in 2004.^[10] Graham is the subject of a biography, Gwethalyn Graham: a Liberated Woman in a Conventional Age, by Barbara Meadowcroft (Toronto: Women's Press, 2008).