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John Glassco (1909—1981) was a Canadian poet, memoirist and novelist.

Born in Montreal, where he attended McGill University without graduating, Glassco left for Paris in February 1928 with his friend, Graeme Taylor, when he was nineteen years old. The two settled in the Montparnasse district of Paris which was then extremely popular amongst the literary intelligentsia. Their three-year stay formed the basis of Glassco's Memoirs of Montparnasse (1970), a description of expatriate life in Paris during the 1920s.

The book is presented as a genuine memoir, although Glassco had lightly fictionalized some aspects of the work. In it, he describes meeting various celebrities who were living in or passing through Paris at the time, such as James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Ford Maddox Ford, Frank Harris, Lord Alfred Douglas and others. In the notes to the republished edition in 2007 further characters are identified as thinly disguised descriptions of Man Ray, Peggy Guggenheim and others.

Glassco went on to earn a strong reputation as a poet. His Selected Poems (1971) won the Canadian Governor General's Award for Literature. The Canada Council for the Arts - Governor General's Literary Awards

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "John Glassco", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0