I first met Harry Bruce one morning in 1971 in the offices of The 4th Estate newspaper. Harry had recently moved to Halifax from Toronto and stopped in to say hello to its editor, Nick Fillmore. I was a young freelancer who’d just dropped off an article I hoped Nick would buy. Nick introduced us.

Of course, I knew of Harry Bruce. As a young, would-be writer, I’d read—and tried, without success, to emulate—Harry’s wonderfully personal style in the many columns and features he wrote for national magazines like Maclean’s, Saturday Night and the Star Weekly. (The Star Weekly, a national newspaper supplement, wasn’t carried in our Halifax paper, but you could still buy it at the corner store. I was usually there waiting when the delivery guy dropped it off, and read it cover to cover, carefully clipping Harry’s latest column to study later.)

Harry suggested we have lunch and a beer. It was the beginning of a more than 50-year mentorship/friendship.

Harry’s decision to relocate to Nova Scotia—and his subsequent success as a freelance writer here, writing primarily about Atlantic Canadian subjects for regional and national audiences—inspired a generation of young writers who wanted to do the same. He was a generous and helpful mentor to many, including me.

His journalistic accomplishments are many and extend far beyond his prodigious collection of local, regional and national magazine articles and newspaper columns. The Atlantic Journalism Awards Foundation presented Harry with its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012.

Harry’s contributions to the development of the Atlantic Canadian magazine industry are equally significant. In 1979, he was the founding editor of Atlantic Insight, which I believe is still the best—and certainly the most popular—magazine to have ever come of this region.

Though it didn’t survive, many writers, editors and publishers Insight spawned—me included—later became involved in Atlantic Canada’s magazine business. All of us owe at least part of our success to the example Harry Bruce provided as editor of the magazine, which was chosen Canada’s “Magazine of the Year in 1979.”

“The world of east coast magazine publishing is a small one,” noted the Ryerson Review of Journalism in a March 2003 look at the state of regional magazine publishing, “and most of the people associated with it have ties to Atlantic Insight, the award-winning monthly (it earned 13 writing awards, including three gold and four silvers, from the National Magazine Awards Foundation) that was published from 1979 to 1989.”

Harry has also written a shelf-full of more than 20 award-winning nonfiction books on everything from his love affair with Nova Scotia to the life and times of famous Prince Edward Island author Lucy Maud Montgomery. His candid biographies of leading Atlantic Canada-based entrepreneurs—Roy Jodrey, Frank Sobey, etc.—have made an important contribution to Atlantic Canada’s business history. His An Illustrated History of Nova Scotia brought the province’s long history to life for contemporary readers and earned him his second Evelyn Richardson Award for Nonfiction at the 1997 Atlantic Book Awards. And then there was his 2010 book on writing, Page Fright, which the Globe and Mail called “a splendid omnibus of why writers write, what keeps them writing, and what happens when they stop (willingly or not).”

And …

His last book, Halifax and Me, a collection of essays, documenting his 50-year “love affair with the fascinating, historic, quirky city of Halifax, Nova Scotia,” was published in 2020—when Harry was 86.

During the last decade or so, we would get together a few times a year for coffee and another chance to chat about writing and life. The last time we met in person—last spring when Harry was 89—he was still talking about his next writing projects.

Alas, that will not be. Yesterday, his son Alec, also an award-winning writer and journalist, emailed me. “I’m saddened to inform you that Dad died earlier this morning in Halifax hospital. He had been ill for some time. Fortunately, he was surrounded by his family to the end, and he went peacefully. He was 90.”

A kind and generous life well lived. And stories so very well told.