Getting Started
A Memoir of the 1950s
With letters from Mordecai Richler, Mavis Gallant, and Brian Moore
Getting Started is a wonderful memoir, a collection of extraordinary letters, and a brilliant recreation of a time when Canadian writers were set to make their mark in the world for the first time.
Writer Brian Moore emigrated from Ireland to Canada in the late 1940s and found work at the Montreal Gazette, where he also found William Weintraub embarking upon a career as a freelance journalist. When he travelled to Paris, Weintraub saw an old friend and former Gazette writer, Mavis Gallant, who filled him in on the tribulations of the expatriate writer’s life (“My room is enormous and the radiator very small indeed”). Gallant introduced Weintraub to another Montreal writer,…
William Weintraub was raised in Montreal and educated at McGill before becoming a journalist and later a filmmaker for the NFB. He is the author of two previous novels, Why Rock the Boat? and The Underdogs, and two non-fiction books, City Unique and Getting Started.
