Unbuttoned

Christopher Dummitt

"This book is a history of the afterlife of Mackenzie King in print and in Canadian culture. When King died in 1950 little was known publicly about his eccentric private life; King's final will declared that his voluminous diary should be destroyed and its contents were carefully guarded during the research and writing of his official biography. Yet twenty five years later, his diaries were publicly available and King's private life was the subject of energetic media discussion, including coverage of CP Stacey's A Very Double Life: The Private World of Mackenzie King, the republication of H S Ferns and Bernard Ostry's The Age of Mackenzie King: Rise of the Leader, and the appearance of the third volume of the official biography by H. Blair Neatby. King increasingly came to be known in public as Weird Willie, the prime minister who communed with ghosts and cavorted with prostitutes....