Gérard Bessette, one of Quebec's most important creative writers, has produced nine novels, two books of literary criticism and one of memoirs, two anthologies, a collection of short stories and one of poetry, and a literary history of French Canada written with two collaborators.

Bessette was born in Sainte-Anne-de-Sabrevois, Quebec, a village on the Richelieu River south of Montreal. His father, Jean-Baptiste Bessette, was a farmer and later became sexton in the village of Saint-Alexandre, to the northeast, near the U.S. border, when Gérard was four. His mother, Victoria Bertrand Bessette, was a seamstress and later a hairdresser. When he was ten, Bessette's family moved to east-end Montreal, where his father became secretary and eventually director of a milk producers cooperative. Bessette's mother opened a grocery store.

He pursued classical studies first at the Collège Saint-Ignace and then at the externat...