Gordon, Charles William, 1860-1937 : Novelist and Presbyterian minister, Charles William Gordon was born September 13, 1860 in Glengarry County, Canada West. He was one of seven children born to Mary Robertson Gordon and Rev. Donald (Daniel) Gordon. Educated at the Universities of Toronto and Edinburgh, he was ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1890. For three years following his ordinance, Gordon travelled the Rocky Mountain region as a missioner to loggers, mineworkers and their families before being called to Stephen's Church in Winnipeg where he remained as minister until his retirement. Active in church organization and social causes, Gordon chaired the Manitoba Council of Industry for 4 years after the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike and negotiated in numerous labour disputes. He campaigned for the League of Nations and in 1921 was elected moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, moving that church towards its partial union with Methodists and Congregationalists to form the United Church of Canada in 1925. In 1915, Gordon joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force as Chaplain of the 43rd Cameron Highlanders, eventually being appointed senior chaplain to the Canadian Armed Forces in England and in France.
Writing under the pen name Ralph Connor, Gordon became one of the most popular novelist of the early twentieth century, selling more than five million copies of more than twenty novels during his lifetime. His writing career began through an attempt to raise awareness and money in Eastern Canada for the support of the Presbyterian Home Mission Committee. For this cause, Gordon wrote a fictionalized account of life in the northwest which would become his first book, Black Rock: A Tale of the Selkirks, initially published in serialized form in 1897 in the Westminster Magazine. The popular success of Black Rock was followed by that of The Sky Pilot (1899), The Man from Glengarry (1901) and The Prospector (1904), making Connor an international best-selling author until the 1920s. His works of fiction "represented a prevailing social view of the sources and patterns of social stability" (Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada, 2002).
