Dictionary of Literary Biography on Kevin (Gerald) Major
Kevin Major's impact on Canadian children's literature has frequently been compared to that of Judy Blume in the United States, both being among the first to present honest, realistic accounts of the problems of the modern adolescent. Not surprisingly, Major's frank approach to the juvenile novel has created a great deal of controversy. School boards in both Newfoundland and Ontario, for example, have steadfastly refused to put his novels on the list of books approved for classroom study and in a celebrated incident in 1982, the chairman of the Rainy River Library Board in Ontario canceled a reading by Major because of the crude language of his novels. Such condemnations, though, are few; most critics of children's literature clearly regard Major as one of Canada's most promising talents.
Major was born on 12 September 1949 in Stephenville, Newfoundland, the youngest of the seven children of Edward Major, a fisherman, and his wife, Jessie Headge Major. Though interested in journalism in high school. Kevin Major turned to studying medicine and finally education while at Memorial University, graduating in 1972 with a bachelor of science degree. He accepted his first full-time teaching position later that year, an experience that led directly to his first publishing venture, a 1974 collection of Newfoundland writing and art titled Doryloads, edited by Major to help preserve a literature and culture that he found almost totally ignored in the schools.
In 1976 Major decided to give up full-time teaching and concentrate on his writing career, supporting himself by periodic work as a supply teacher. Within months he completed his first novel, Hold Fast, which, after some revising, was published in 1978. The success of this first effort was resounding. Not only did it receive all three of the major Canadian awards for children's literature (the Canada Council Children's literature Prize, the Canadian library Association Book of the Year for Children Award, and the Ruth Schwartz Children's Book Award) but it was also included on the 1980 Hans Christian Andersen Honor List, thus making it one of the most acclaimed books in the history of Canadian children's literature.
Hold Fast traces the familiar story of the difficulties a parentless child faces when forced to adjust to a new environment. But Major's Michael of Marten, Newfoundland, is not another Anne of Green Gables. Rather, he is a troubled atomicage adolescent, unable to deal with either his nascent sexuality or the transition from his small coastal hometown to the urban world of St. Albert. In his new world Michael's accent is ridiculed and his attempts to fit in both in his new town and at school are consistently frustrated by adults. Finally, he rebels, escaping from the city and returning to his wilderness where he defiantly asserts his individuality by surviving for three days in the bathroom of a campsite abandoned for the winter. But Michael's quest does not have a traditional happy ending, for though he finally returns to his beloved Marten, his accomplice on his odyssey, his cousin Curtis, must return home to confront his brutish father with no real assurance that anything will really change. Thus, though the problems considered in Hold Fast may be stereotypic, the characters are hardly those found in the traditional juvenile novel. Critics of Hold Fast have praised not only the realism of Major's characters but also the accurate portrayal of what is unique in Newfoundland, in particular its dialect and its sense of the past. As one reviewer wrote in an October 1978 article for Saturday Night: "You ... find yourself wanting to see all of this, this grand and generous and overflowing heritage, set down. Major is one of those devoted to setting it down, before it disappears entirely. The fact that he has done so in a novel for adolescents, and enjoyed a certain modest success in the process, is in its small way an emblem of the beautiful thing that Canadian regional culture has become in the 1970s."
Far from Shore, Major's second novel, published in 1980, is an even more innovative and challenging examination of the difficulties of adolescence. Told from multiple perspectives, the narrative consists of interior monologues of the five main characters who recount the problems of Newfoundland's Slade family, particularly those of the oldest son, Christopher. The father, jobless, frequently drunk, is forced to move to Alberta to find work. The mother, tired of trying to keep her quarrelsome family together, is on the verge of having an affair with her employer. Chris's life is a series of adolescent tragedies: he breaks up with his girlfriend, fails grade ten, is unable to get a job, and takes up with a gang of older youths who eventually get him into trouble with the law. And yet somehow, despite all adversity and with the somewhat convenient support of a newfound girlfriend, Chris survives. But again, as in Hold Fast, there is no assurance that all will end well. Although the father and the mother are together again at the end, the father still has no job and, as Chris's final words suggest, if he does not find one, things could get "loused up here again." Though some critics question the overall success of Major's narrative style in Far from Shore, Silver Donald Cameron in his March 1981 review for Atlantic Insight provides perhaps the best summary of critical response when he suggests that though this book "is less perfect than his first, it is because he has set himself a much more difficult challenge." Cameron adds that he suspects that very few youthful readers "will care about such quibbles," for they will find "very few books anywhere which speak to their condition with such candor and understanding." Far from Shore won the Canadian Young Adult Book Award and was named Best Book of the Year by School Library Journal.
The third of Major's juvenile novels, Thirty-six Exposures, published in 1984, is his most ambitious book and also his most controversial. The subject is again the maturation of a Newfoundland teenager, in this case a poet-photographer named Lorne about to graduate from high school and wondering what he is to do with his life. Yet, rather than simply tell Lorne's story or even present it from multiple viewpoints, Major chooses to present thirty-six verbal snapshots. The result is a kind of puzzle that the reader must put together, a blurry scene that must be put into focus. For many critics, the complexity of the style was too demanding for an adolescent readership. Even more disturbing was the language of the characters and the frankness with which the book deals with sex. Paul Kropp suggests in a November 1984 review for Quill and Quire that the book may be testing the limits of the adolescent novel and that it is unlikely to find "a place in our schools." More significant, however, Kropp questions the somewhat contrived and, he feels, unnecessary tragedy that concludes the novel. But there are others who consider Major's third book his finest. In fact, in an Atlantic Insight review for November 1984, Lorri Neilsen confidently calls Thirty-six Exposures "the best Canadian portrait ever drawn of seventeen-going-on-adult."
Major now lives in Sandy Cove, Newfoundland, with his wife Anne Crawford Major (they married in 1981) and their sons, Luke and Duncan. His fourth novel, "Dear Bruce Springsteen," will be published in the fall of 1987, and he is presently working on a fifth novel that promises to add another chapter to his continuing portrayal of contemporary Newfoundland life. As he writes in his introduction to his earliest book, Doryloads, it is only "when we understand where we have come from and what our present way of life is like, that we can think wisely about what we want our futures to be."
This is the complete article, containing 1,290 words
(approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page).
