During the two decades surrounding the turn of the century, Gilbert Parker enjoyed international fame as a novelist who romanticized Quebec and the Canadian Northwest and as a public figure who spoke for Canada and the British empire. In 1902 he was knighted for his writing, and in 1903 he placed fourth (behind Wilfrid Laurier, Lord Strathcona, and Charles Tupper) in a Montreal newspaper poll listing the greatest living Canadians. Yet today the dozens of British, American, and Canadian editions of his more than thirty books gather dust in secondhand bookstores, and his fiction is usually dismissed as facile and unrealistic. An eloquent speaker and a fastidious dresser, Parker was occasionally denigrated as a social and political climber for cultivating powerful literary and political friends, particularly in England, where he served as M.P. for Gravesend for eighteen years (1900-1918). However, he was a sincere, hardworking patriot who may have accomplished his most lasting work not as a writer but as director of American propaganda for the British during World War I.
