Robert Sellar

Born in Glasgow in 1841, he came to Canada with his family in 1856 and settled in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. He is best known as the editor and proprietor of the Huntingdon Gleaner, the newspaper he led for many years, and as a writer deeply engaged with public life in rural Quebec.

His nonfiction often focused on history, politics, and the place of Protestant communities in French-speaking Quebec. That perspective shaped some of his best-known books, including The History of the County of Huntingdon and The Tragedy of Quebec, works that reflect both his strong convictions and his close knowledge of the region.

Sellar died in 1919. Today he is remembered less as a novelist than as a journalist-historian whose writing captured the outlook, anxieties, and debates of an important corner of Canadian life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.