As the earliest volume of Upper or Lower Canadian writing to which the author signed his name, Levi Adams's Jean Baptiste (1825) has received some critical attention. The work, which was printed for the author and then reprinted in Canadian Review and Literary and Historical Journal in 1826, was part of a minor writing and publishing boom in Montreal in the mid 1820s. A wellknown 1960 article by Carl F. Klinck brought Adams's name to the attention of many students, but unfortunately connected it with an extensive body of anonymous works subsequently proved to have been written by another Canadian, George Longmore. Adams's own work appears to consist only of Jean Baptiste, two short stories that appeared in the Canadian Magazine (June 1825), and a few poems published in the Montreal Herald in 1825 and 1826, all signed simply "L. A."

Very little is known of Adams's life. The documents attached to his 1827 petition...