Editing Barometer Rising (section)

==Background==
[[Dorothy Duncan]], Hugh MacLennan's wife, convinced him that the failure of his first two novels arose from not truly knowing the setting, as one had been set in Europe and the other in the United States. She encouraged him to write about Canada, the country he knew best.<ref name=cameron133>Cameron (1981), 133.</ref> She told him that "Nobody's going to understand Canada until she evolves a literature of her own, and you're the fellow to start bringing Canadian novels up to date."<ref name=cameron133/> ''Barometer Rising'' became Hugh MacLennan's first published novel. He drew upon his own experiences of the Halifax Explosion, having survived it as ten-year-old boy,<ref name="auto"/> but also on [[Homer]]'s ''[[Odyssey]]'' for narrative direction.<ref name="auto"/>

Prior to MacLennan's novel, there had been no real tradition of Canadian literature; he sought to define Canada for Canadians through a national novel.<ref>Peepre-Bordessa, Mari (1990), 52.</ref>