William Arthur Deacon is a third cousin to my mother, Elma, (and you can figure your connection from there). His father, William Henry Deacon, and Thomas Rufus Deacon (Winnipeg Mayor) were brothers.
William Arthur Deacon, literary critic and editor (b at Pembroke, Ont 6 Apr 1890; d at Toronto 5 Aug 1977). Trained as a lawyer in Winnipeg, Deacon was book review editor of, in turn, the Manitoba Free Press (1921), Saturday Night (1922-28), the Toronto Mail and Empire (1928-36) and the Mail and Empire's successor, the Globe and Mail (1936-61). A pioneer literary nationalist, he was both a provoker of and a participant in the cultural ferment of the 1920s, when he did his own best work: this includes Pens and Pirates (1923), Poteen and Other Essays (1926) and especially The Four Jameses (1927), a satirical study of Canadian poetasters. But in the 1930s his reputation withered in the shade of modernist writing and radical politics. At length he came to appear as a retrograde force to a literary culture that did not give him the credit he deserved for his long years of tireless activity.
