Gilbert Parker (1862 - 1932) - Author Collection

Sir Horatio Gilbert George Parker, 1st Baronet PC, known as Gilbert Parker, Canadian novelist and British politician, was born at Camden East, Addington, Ontario, the son of Captain J. Parker, R.A. In the early 1890s he began to gain a growing reputation in London as a writer of romantic fiction.The best of his novels are those in which he first took for his subject the history and life of the French Canadians; and his permanent literary reputation rests on the fine quality, descriptive and dramatic, of his Canadian stories. Parker had three that made it into the top 10 on the annual list of bestselling novels in the United States, two of which were on it for two years in a row. The 1905 New International Encyclopaedia claimed that it was the “dramatic quality of his . . . books [which] won for them [their] considerable popularity, despite their disregard of truth in local color.”