During the final twenty-five years of his life, Jacques Ferron emerged among the Quebecois working class and intelligentsia as one of the most charismatic figures not just of his period but of the whole literary history of Quebec. The extent of his medical, political, and literary gifts and accomplishments has become known to the rest of Canada through a steady trickle of good translations of his novels and stories and through the publicity attending his sudden death. Although he had already turned forty when he first met with the kind of literary success that all writers seek (in his case winning a Governor General's Award for fiction for his 1962 short-story collection Contes du pays incertain), Ferron in fact had served a long and very practical literary apprenticeship.

During the 1950s he wrote a series of culturally durable plays, and, even more significant, in the years before the publication...