Ringuet was one of the first major novelists in French Canada. During a period when literature, and the novel in particular, was considered an instrument for propagating a nationalist ideology, he published a book that is still considered a classic: 30 Arpents (1938), translated to English under the title Thirty Acres (1940). It has at the same time a documentary value and an aesthetic quality.

Ringuet was born Philippe Panneton in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, on 30 April 1895. The son of Ephrem-François Panneton, a doctor, and Eva Ringuet Panneton, he took his mother's family name as a pseudonym. After his third year of college, in 1914 he undertook studies in medicine in Quebec and then in Montreal and went to Paris to specialize in otorhinolaryngology from 1920 to 1923. While practicing in Montreal, he carried on research and published articles in his field. By 1935 he was an associate professor at the University of...