Cabbagetown: The Classic Novel of the Depression in Canada

Hugh Garner

McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 2002 - Fiction - 415 pages

Toronto's Cabbagetown in the Depression...North America's largest Anglo-Saxon slum. Ken Tilling leaves school to face the bleak prospects of the dirty thirties-where do you go, what do you do, how do you make a life for yourself when all the world offers in unemployment, poverty and uncertainty?

"As a social document, Cabbagetown is as important and revealing as either The Tin Flute or The Grapes of Wrath. Stern realism has also projected upon the pages of a whole gallery of types, lifelike and convincing. He is well fitted to hold the mirror up to human nature." Globe and Mail.

Cabbagetown was first published in an abbreviated paperback edition in 1950 and was published in its entirety in 1968. This, the first quality paperback edition, contains the full unexpurgated text of Cabbagetown.

About the author

Hugh Garner is one of Canada's best known writers. Born in Yorkshire, England he grew up in the Cabbagetown section of Toronto. He left technicall school on his sixteenth birthday and the next day began work at the Toronto Star. During the Depression he rode freight trains across Canada and the U.S.A., working at every conceivable kind of job. With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he joined the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the International Brigades. Back in Canada after the war, he worked at odd jobs until World War II when he joined the Navy and served on Atlantic convoy duty until 1945. He is the author of nine novels, five collections of short stories, a book of humourous essays, and his autobiography One Damn Thing After Another.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Cabbagetown: The Classic Novel of the Depression in Canada
• Author: Hugh Garner
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 2002
• ISBN: 0070915520, 9780070915527
• Length: 415 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Historical / General; History / Canada / General; History / General