By turns polemicist, literary critic, poet, novelist, essayist, and dramatist, André Major is a Quebec writer who has practiced nearly every literary form, including the television play. If this manysidedness has made Major of special interest, so too has his intellectual journey, which has made him representative of a certain type of youth during the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. It is, however, for his work in fiction--notably his celebrated series Histoires de déserteurs-that Major is best known.

Major, the son of Arthur Major, a teacher, and his wife, the former Anna Sharp, was born in Montreal in April 1942. He was educated at the Collège de Montréal until he was dismissed for having published and distributed a Socialist, independentist journal entitled Liberté Etudiante. With hindsight, one might say, a little mischievously perhaps, that this episode prefigured his entry onto the...