Hemingway, The Wild Years

Part One. MANNERS AND MORALS

Toronto after the Great War was not much different from Atlanta or Denver. It had rejoiced in victory, mourned its dead, then turned to the problems of a postwar world. It was the same in Canada as in the United States. Peace had been bought with a promise. Tomorrow glittered. But the realities of today were flat.

Toronto had its recession, its inflation, its own housing shortage. And, always, there were the restless ranks of embittered ex-servicemen. They sunned themselves on the benches at Riverdale Zoo, strolled across the tailored greens of Exhibition Park. Their day was fast ending. The city on the north shore of Lake Ontario had begun to stir, breathing again after four years of war, and the plight of a handful of veterans gradually took on the vapidity of yesterday’s news.

It was today’s news which counted and, for the 400,000 citizens of Toronto, today’s news meant the Star. With a range of interests as broad as that of any newspaper in North America, the Toronto Star had in 1920 set its type to the pulse of the world. Expanding columns on corruption in Chicago and riots in Berlin crowded against date lines from Ottawa and Toronto.

On one day each week, Sunday, the Star became a ritual of reading for many hundreds of thousands. Known as the Toronto Star Weekly, it was an inch-thick edition priced at ten cents, and its reading time, front to back, was over five hours. The Weekly drew an audience extending far beyond me confines of Toronto; thousands of copies went to Montreal and Windsor, to Detroit, Buffalo and Chicago. Here was an omnibus of newsprint, fashioned with something for everyone. It was news and editorials and features, but most of all it was entertainment — comment, comics and criticism, and fiction and poetry. Hundreds of writers shaped that entertainment. Some belonged to the Star’s regular staff, many …