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Barometer Rising

Author: Hugh MacLennan
Publication date: 1941
Genre: Fiction 

About the Work

Cover of Barometer Rising

Barometer Rising is a romantic-realist novel by Canadian author Hugh MacLennan. The work explores life in Halifax, Nova Scotia, during World War I, and its interruption by the Halifax explosion.


Challenges in Canada

At a convention in 1960, members of the Manitoba School Trustees Association voted unanimously to ask Manitoba’s department of education to remove this novel from the high school curriculum. “What the trustees objected to is the vulgarity and the language used in it,” said Frank Kennedy, a trustee from Norwood. Most trustees had not read the novel.


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