In his memoirs Dr. Kirkonnell has avoided a merely chronological arrangement of his autobiography but sought rather to take various phases of the Canadian tradition and to analyse his experience of each down through the years.

Watson Kirkconnell (1895-1977) was an army officer, a professor emeritus of Latin and English, ninth president of Acadia University (1948-1964), a Milton scholar, author of many volumes of prose and poetry, historian, and genealogist. He was also the joint founder of the Federal Citizenship Branch (1940), the Humanities Research Council of Canada (1943) and the Baptist Federation of Canada (1944). In 1936 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.