Georges Bugnet holds a singular place in French-Canadian writing between the two wars. Although he is considered by many to be marginal, others classify him as unique, the one writer of French origin published in the twentieth century whose career was fundamentally Canadian. He has frequently been compared to Louis Hémon, whose Maria Chapdelaine (1916) has played a more influential role in the history of French-Canadian literature, but Bugnet is at once more profound than Hémon and more responsive to North American realities. He may furthermore be distinguished clearly from the tradition within which Hémon is situated, that of the roman du terroir (novel of the soil), both by the variety of his writing and by his somewhat ambiguous view of the natural world, which is at once classical and Christian. In all things he was severely antimodern, intransigently Catholic, and yet a...