The Town Below

· Voyageur Classics Book 22 · Dundurn
Ebook
368
Pages
Eligible
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About this ebook

Originally published in 1944 in French as Au pied de la pente douce, The Town Below takes place in St. Joseph Parish of Quebec City's Saint-Sauveur suburb. Saint-Sauveur is a parochial and provincial place where narrow piety and corruption can be found in every corner, and Denis and Lise, two adolescents in love, scandalize the town with their affair. Scheming politicians and clergymen and grasping social climbers mix with salt-of-the-earth citizens in a rough-and-tumble satiric assault on pre-Quiet Revolution Quebec mores and attitudes.

The Town Below won the Prix David and the Prix de la langue française. Lemelin was also awarded Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships. A bestseller in Quebec when it originally appeared, The Town Below has been called the "pioneer novel of working-class Quebec" and exploded, with great controversy, the smothering social and religious strictures prevalent among postwar Québécois. The novel was first published in English by Reynal & Hitchcock in 1948.

About the author

Pauline Johnson (1861â??1913) was Canada's first Native author. Her most famous collection of verse, Flint and Feather, went into many printings and was successfully followed by three volumes of sketches and short fiction, The Moccasin Maker, Legends of Vancouver, and The Shagganappi. 

Michael Gnarowski co-edited The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada, compiled The Concise Bibliography of English-Canadian Literature, and edited the Critical Views on Canadian Writers Series for McGraw-Hill Ryerson. He has contributed to many reference works, foremost amongst which are The Canadian Encyclopedia and The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry. Presently, he is series editor for the re-issue of Hugh MacLennan's novels by McGill-Queen's University Press.

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