On 29 October 1890, Joe Wallace was born in Toronto to Thomas Wallace and Mary Redmond. He was the fourth of seven children. When his mother died in 1897, due to complications related to child birth, his father move his family to Nova Scotia, living in Truro, North Sydney, and Halifax. At the age of eleven, Wallace ran away from home. His father, in response, sent his son to St. Patrick's Catholic Home for Boys. In 1910, he attended St. Francis Xavier University, from which he was expelled two years later. His brother got him a job at the International Correspondence School, becoming the Halifax district manager by 1911. He worked there until 1916. In 1915, he married Therese Dorothy Granville, siring four children. In 1920, he resigned from the Liberals to join the socialist Halifax Labour Party, which was subsequently affiliated with the Canadian Labour Party. In 1922, he joined the Communist Party of Canada, for whom he wrote articles, essays, and poems for three major Canadian Communist newspapers: the Worker, the Daily Clarion, and the Canadian Tribune. He later became a full-time CPC journalist and activist after leaving his career in advertising in 1933. In 1925, his five-year-old daughter died; in 1927, his wife died. In 1928, he married Grace Beardsley, but soon separated. In 1933, he ran in the 17th Nova Scotia general election for a seat in Halifax. He was backed by the UnitedFront Party, led by J. B. McLachlan. In 1940, when Mackenzie King invoked the War Measures act, making Communist activities effectively illegal, Wallace was imprisoned between 8 March 1941 – October 1942. After his time in prison, he released his first volume of poetry Night Is Ended. He then worked as a lathe operator at Ferranti Electric in Toronto, where he helped organize a union. In his spare time, he also began writing a column for the Tribune. In 1952, he help found the literary magazineNew Frontier, and served as one of its first members of the editorial committee. The magazine survived for five years. In 1957, he traveled to Russia for ten-months, where he found his poetry known and appreciated. He returned to Russia in 1960, staying until 1963. In 1966, Wallace was invited as a guest of the Soviet government on a summer cruise to Denmark and Russia upon the luxury linerPushkin. In 1968, he moved to Vancouver. On 1 December 1975, he died of a heart attack in Vancouver. For the entirety of his life, he was a devout Catholic.
Legacy
From the 1950s until after his death, Wallace was the most famous Canadian poet in Eastern Europe and China. In 1981, Progress Books prepared a selected edition of his works, titled Joe Wallace Poems. In 2010, two of his poems were anthologized in Brian Trehearne's 'Canadian Poetry: 1920–1960.
