Hugh MacLennan set his 1951 novel Each Man's Son in the town of his birth, early twentieth-century Glace Bay, Nova Scotia. At the time he was born, in 1907, Glace Bay was a booming coal town in the fast-growing industrial area at the eastern tip of Cape Breton Island, and his father, Samuel, was a col-liery doctor for the Dominion Coal Company. The century before, in 1832, MacLennan's great-grandfather, Neil, had arrived in Cape Breton with the great wave of Highland migration to the island in the 1820s and 1830s and settled in Malagawatch. Each Man's Son is situated within a common experience of outmi-gration from the countryside, which had shaped MacLennan's own family his-tory. It is, in MacLennan's telling, a tragic story of Highlanders leaving behind bucolic home communities for the ‘country of coal’, where they experienced a sudden and disorienting departure from a past ‘unblighted by the mines’. Fighting and drinking appear in the novel as symptoms of cultural despair and displacement among Gaelic-speaking miners lost in the modern world. Archie MacNeil, a brawny prize fighter and would-be miner living away in the United States, embodies this incapacity. Dan Ainslie, a local doctor tortured by his Calvinism, is closer to MacLennan's own experience. These two characters, Ainslie and MacNeil, drive the narrative arc of Each Man's Son to its tragic conclusion and stand for the profound class divisions of the mining town: ‘It was hard to believe, in the grounds of the doctor's house, that the beginning of the miners’ row was less than a quarter mile away.’ Though born in Glace Bay, MacLennan resided in Montreal and had limited direct experience with the coal town. His romantic, tragic representation of Glace Bay and its Highland resi-dents was itself a metropolitan projection upon a hinterland community, recon-structed through ethnic essentialism and class stereotypes. Nonetheless, the novel and MacLennan's own social origins suggest an important, yet often understated, historical fact: those who migrated from Highland settlements in rural Cape Breton were not all destined to work underground; a significant number joined a middle class that expanded with the making of industrial Cape Breton and constituted an important element of the social order.