Poet of passionate sensitivity, essayist of ranging depth, novelist of technical daring, artist-hero of contemporary Quebec, Fernand Ouellette is as closely associated with the review Liberté and with the publishing house Editions de l'Hexagone as he is with his published works. During the last two decades in particular, he has been increasingly influential, even beyond the scope of his art, in the quiet social and discordant political revolutions of his native Quebec and in identifying and contributing to a curiously Quebecois poetic, aesthetic, and identity. His decision to decline (on political and moral grounds) the Governor General's Award for nonfiction, offered to him for his 1970 essay collection Les Actes retrouvés, has marked the greatest stroke of his literary life and career. His declaration of non serviam distinguished him less as only the second French-Canadian writer to refuse the prestigious award--two years earlier Hubert Aquin had...