Major (John) Richardson

Born in Upper Canada in 1796, John Richardson served with British forces during the War of 1812 and was taken prisoner by the Americans after the Battle of Moraviantown. The experience stayed with him and later fed into both his fiction and his nonfiction writing about war and colonial life.

He spent many of his most productive years in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, building a career as an author and journalist. Richardson is best known for Wacousta; or, The Prophecy (1832), a historical romance set in eighteenth-century North America, and he is often described as the first Canadian-born novelist to achieve international recognition.

Along with novels, he wrote poetry, memoir, and journalism, drawing on military life, Indigenous-set frontier conflict, and the social world of British North America. He died in New York City in 1852, but his work remains important in the history of Canadian writing.