The Fin de Siecle Spirit uses the biography of an unjustly forgotten writer to recreate some of the intersecting and contrasting features of the Canadian and American literary milieux in the 1890s. Born in England in 1868, Walter Blackburn Harte immigrated to Canada in 1886, where he established himself as a journalist and writer of short stories and magazine articles.

In 1890 he moved to the United States, to serve as assistant editor of the New England and Arena magazines, and subsequently as editor or contributor with a series of experimental little magazines. Harte's innovative essays and fiction achieved an underground reputation among the iconoclastic Canadian and American writers of the period. His life and writings shed light on the experience of a generation of Canadian and American writers who faced the social and cultural crises of the end of a century.