Article

Merrill Denison

Published Online February 7, 2008

Last Edited December 15, 2013

Merrill Denison, playwright, journalist, writer, historian (b at Detroit, Mich 23 June 1893; d at San Diego, Calif 13 June 1975). English Canada's first important 20th-century playwright, he emerged from the Canadian Little Theatre movement in the 1920s.

Denison, Merrill

Merrill Denison, playwright, journalist, writer, historian (b at Detroit, Mich 23 June 1893; d at San Diego, Calif 13 June 1975). English Canada's first important 20th-century playwright, he emerged from the Canadian Little Theatre movement in the 1920s. His satireBrothers in Arms, produced in 1921 at Hart House Theatre, University of Toronto, became one of the most frequently produced English Canadian plays. Denison's literary reputation as a playwright of realistic dramas and satirical comedies is largely based on his 1923 anthology The Unheroic North, which contains his most important naturalistic social problem play, Marsh Hay, not produced until 1974. Henry Hudson and Other Plays (1931) was the first Canadian radio play anthology published. Denison also authored the novel Klondike Mike (1943) and corporate histories for Massey-Harris, Molson's, Ontario Hydro and the Bank of Montreal.