Leo Kennedy is valued perhaps less for any of his publications--a single volume of verse, a handful of short stories, a few dozen essays--than he is for his central role in the Montreal Group as midwife to modernism and cosmopolitanism in Canadian poetry of the 1920s and to the use of social themes in Canadian literature of the 1930s.

Inheritor of an Irish gift for words, John Leo Kennedy was born in Liverpool, England, on 22 August 1907, and at the age of five he was brought to Canada by his parents, John A. and Lillian Bullen Kennedy. His early education in Montreal's St. Patrick's Academy ended after grade six, and at thirteen Kennedy went to work as a shipping clerk and bookkeeper for his father's ship-chandling business. Although he returned to school only briefly--two years of night schooling as an extension student at the University of Montreal--Kennedy estimates that...