The Golden Time is a 1949 novel by the Canadian author Harold Standish

Harold Standish

Harold Edwin Standish was a Canadian poet and novelist, best known for his 1949 novel The Golden Time and his long poem The Lake of Souls...

. It tells the story of the McGibbon family of Chatham, Ontario

Ontario

Ontario is a province of Canada, located in east-central Canada. It is Canada's most populous province and second largest in total area. It is home to the nation's most populous city, Toronto, and the nation's capital, Ottawa....

 as they struggle with various troubles, including alcoholism

Alcoholism

Alcoholism is a broad term for problems with alcohol, and is generally used to mean compulsive and uncontrolled consumption of alcoholic beverages, usually to the detriment of the drinker's health, personal relationships, and social standing...

, domestic abuse, and their ultimate triumph as owners of a tobacco farm in the countryside near Chatham. The novel was first published by in Toronto

Toronto

Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...

 by Macmillan

Macmillan Publishers

Macmillan Publishers Ltd, also known as The Macmillan Group, is a privately held international publishing company owned by Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. It has offices in 41 countries worldwide and operates in more than thirty others.-History:...

 in 1949, and was later reprinted in several paperback

Paperback

Paperback, softback or softcover describe and refer to a book by the nature of its binding. The covers of such books are usually made of paper or paperboard, and are usually held together with glue rather than stitches or staples...

 editions. Like other novels of the period by such contemporaries of Standish as Morley Callaghan

Morley Callaghan

Morley Callaghan, was a Canadian novelist, short story writer, playwright, TV and radio personality.-Biography:...

 and Hugh Garner

Hugh Garner

Hugh Garner was a Canadian novelist.Born in Batley, Yorkshire, England, Garner came to Canada in 1919 with his parents, and was raised in Toronto, Ontario. During the Great Depression, he rode the rails in both Canada and the United States, and then joined the International Brigades in the Spanish...

, The Golden Time uses terse, straightforward prose reminiscent of social realist

Social realism

Social Realism, also known as Socio-Realism, is an artistic movement, expressed in the visual and other realist arts, which depicts social and racial injustice, economic hardship, through unvarnished pictures of life's struggles; often depicting working class activities as heroic...

 genre. As a significant departure from realism, however, the novel uses a number of time-shift sequences to emphasize the connections between the different generations of the McGibbon family. In this sense, the novel can be regarded as a precursor to such modernist

Modernism

Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...

 Canadian novels as Sheila Watson's The Double Hook

The Double Hook

The Double Hook is a novel written by Sheila Watson, which is considered "a seminal work in the development of contemporary Canadian literature."Published in 1959, The Double Hook is written in a style more like prose poetry than fiction...

and Hugh MacLennan

Hugh MacLennan

John Hugh MacLennan, CC, CQ was a Canadian author and professor of English at McGill University. He won five Governor General's Awards and a Royal Bank Award.-Family and childhood:...

's The Watch That Ends the Night

The Watch That Ends the Night

The Watch That Ends the Night is a novel by Canadian author and academic Hugh MacLennan. The title refers to a line in Isaac Watts' interpretation of Psalm 90...

(both published in 1959).

The Golden Time was Standish's first novel. He published just one more novel, Blues for Loretta, in (1954) before giving up fiction to concentrate on poetry

Poetry

Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...

. In his biography

Biography

A biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. More than a list of basic facts , biography also portrays the subject's experience of those events...

 of Standish, Douglas Scott quotes the legendary literary critic George Woodcock

George Woodcock

George Woodcock was a Canadian writer of political biography and history, an anarchist thinker, an essayist and literary critic. He was also a poet, and published several volumes of travel writing. He founded in 1959 the journal Canadian Literature, the first academic journal specifically...

as saying that The Golden Time is "a work that makes one wish Standish had turned his pen to fiction more often."