Albert Laberge was a pioneer of naturalism and realism in French-Canadian fiction, modes that developed late in Quebec because of the powerful conservative influences of clerical and lay ideologues. Together with his friend Rodolphe Girard's Marie Calumet (1904), Laberge's novel, La Scouine, published privately in an edition of sixty copies in 1918 (translated as Bitter Bread, 1977), launched a short-lived foray against the idealized roman de la fidélité which presented the Quebec countryside as a haven of tranquillity and spiritual Catholic values. With a few notable exceptions (especially Ringuet's Trente Arpents, 1938), the Quebec novel eschewed realism until World War II, and it was not until the late 1950s and the 1960s that a neonaturalist trend reappeared, some four decades after La Scouine, in works by Gérard Bessette, Marie-Claire Blais, and Roch Carrier.

Laberge was born to farmers, Pierre and Joséphine Boursier Laberge, in Beauharnois...