Abstract
Unearthed recordings reveal the early days of the literary powerhouses who gave birth to CanLit in the 1960s. From 1969 to 1970, radio interviewer Earle Toppings recorded sixteen Canadian writers and poets who went on to become pillars of Canadian literature. These emerging icons of Canadian literature, including Margaret Laurence, Sinclair Ross, and Al Purdy, captured in Toppings’s interviews and readings, give intimate and compelling views of their developing prose and poetry, in their own words.