Louis Dudek has been a pioneer in Canadian small-press publishing and a major influence on the development of the Canadian long poem. He was born in Montreal on 6 February 1918 to parents (Vincent and Stanislawa Rozynska Dudek) who had emigrated the previous year from Poland. He entered McGill University in 1936 and received a B.A. in English and history in 1939. He had begun writing poetry while in grade school, and during a year of unemployment following graduation from McGill "reading H. D., Richard Aldington, Sandburg, and Masters ... branched off into an experimental free verse" with "not the least idea of publishing." During this period he also began writing advertising copy free-lance, and in 1940 he obtained a salaried job with the Canadian Advertising Agency in Montreal.

In 1943 he became associated with John Sutherland's newly founded little magazine First Statement and together with Irving Layton moved it toward an iconoclastic, antiestablishment...