John Buell, a full-time university professor in Montreal and a part-time novelist, has written four novels in seventeen years that have gained respect of reviewers at home and abroad. Yet he remains an obscure writer. But his lack of celebrity is by design, for Buell has shunned the literary limelight in favor of the university life, which has allowed him the quiet and security to write.

John Edward Buell was born in Montreal to a French-Canadian mother, Antonia Durocher Buell, and an English-Canadian father, Thomas Buell. The family lived in a predominantly French and Irish Montreal neighborhood, where Buell grew up speaking both English and French. A Catholic, he was educated at Montreal's Loyola College, a Jesuit school which merged with another college in 1974 to become the nonsectarian Concordia University.

It was in 1947 that Buell began writing, turning out a dozen minor radio dramas that were performed on...