In the foreword to his 1947 translation of Félix-Antoine Savard's Boss of the River (Menaud maître-draveur, 1937), Alan Sullivan wrote that he hoped this story would show the "wealth of creative treasure" in Quebec and that it would "advance the cause of Canadian unity." This Anglocentric focus was characteristic of both the time and the man: it typifies the idea about nationhood that dominated English-Canadian culture between the wilderness stories of Charles G. D. Roberts and the railway poems of E. J. Pratt. When a bishop, in one of Sullivan's most widely read novels, The Rapids (1920), advises another character to read Henry Drummond and Marcus Aurelius, the point is underlined. Drummond's patois verses were long considered in English Canada to be realistic portraits of the quaintness of rural Quebec culture, a culture that was destined (it was thought) to be absorbed by English rationalism. Anglo-Protestant values...