Leo Kennedy

"While working at various jobs, Kennedy became affiliated with Leon Edel and others in the McGill Group" or Montreal Group.[2] Becoming a "friend of A. J. M. Smith, F. R. Scott, A. M. Klein, and Leon Edel, he contributed to the McGill Literary Supplement and then to its replacements, the McGill Fortnightly Review, and Canadian Mercury."[1]

After the Fortnightly ceased in 1927, Kennedy and Scott founded the Canadian Mercury in 1928, which put out seven issues through 1929: "though short-lived, the magazine published important work by the editors (including Kennedy's manifesto 'The Future of Canadian Literature') as well as by Smith and A.M. Klein."[5]

The Crash of 1929 destroyed the Mercury, but Kennedy continued to write and publish. "During the Depression he regularly contributed poems, short stories, and essays to the Canadian Forum and Saturday Night."[5] By that time he was a family man, with a wife, Miriam, and a son, Stephen.[6]

In 1931 Kennedy became friends with novelist and poet Raymond Knister when the latter moved to Montreal. Kennedy and Knister began planning an anthology, similar to Knister's Canadian Short Stories (1928), of Canadian modernist poetry.[7] Knister died the next year, but Scott and Smith got involved in the project. In 1933, at the urging of poet E.J. Pratt, Macmillan published The Shrouding," Kennedy's one poetry book. It was dedicated to Knister.[5] In 1936 the anthology of modernist poetry was published as New Provinces: Poems by several authors. Kennedy, represented with ten poems, was one of six authors.[8]

By the time he appeared with Smith, Scott, Klein, Pratt, and Robert Finch in New Provinces in 1936, Kennedy had repudiated his early work and was seeking a poetry that could contribute to social and political reform."[5] He had become "part of a politically active circle of intellectuals in Montreal and Toronto in the 1930s"[1] and a frequent contributor to leftist magazines. He joined the editorial committee of New Frontier (1936–38), a journal of left-wing opinion and culture, and contributed essays and verse.[5]

At the same time, some "of his socialist writings were published pseudonymously, for he was working throughout the 1930s for advertising agencies in Montreal, Toronto, and Detroit."[3] Pseudonyms he was known to use include Arthur Beaton, Leonard Bullen, William Crowl, Edgar Main, and Peter Quinn)"[2]

After New Frontier closed down, Kennedy "left for the United States to pursue an advertising career,"[5] while "continuing to publish reviews and witty verse pseudonymously"[2] "In 1942 he moved to a Chicago agency and [also] freelanced as a book reviewer for the Chicago Sun."[3]

Kennedy spent the rest of his working life as a copywriter in the United States.[1] "He eventually settled in Norwalk, Connecticut, as a staff writer for Reader's Digest."[3]

The Shrouding "was reprinted in 1975 with an introduction by Leon Edel, who described Kennedy as the sprightly leader of Canada's ‘graveyard school’ of metaphysical poetry." Kennedy's "short story ‘A priest in the family’, first published in The Canadian Forum (April 1933), was reprinted in Great stories of the world (1972)."[3]

In 1976 Kennedy "returned to his literary friends in Montreal, living for ten years with his daughter-in-law."[3] There "he worked on literary memoirs he was not to finish,"[5] spending his time writing "poems for children, satiric verse, and broadsides."[1]

Kennedy eventually retired "to a hotel in Pasadena, California." He reportedly died in 2000.[3]