The fusion of the imagination and the material universe: Hugh Hood, Flying a red kite (1962)

Abstract

In the first weeks of January 1957 Hugh (John Blagdon) Hood moved to Hartford, Connecticut, U. S. A, where he became Professor at Saint Joseph College. At the time Hood did not know that he was going to become one of Canada's greatest stylists and contemporary short story writers. Between January 1957 and March 1962, when he was going through a final selection o short stories for his first book, Flying a Red Kite (FRK), Hugh Hood wrote thirty-eight short stories and two novels (God Rest You Merry and Hungry Generations). The numbers show that Hood was an extremely productive writer in that period. From the thirty-eight stories he chose eleven for FRK, fourteen of them were published in subsequent collections, in various journals and short story anthologies, while thirteen of them have not been published yet.