Louis Hémon

Louis Hémon (Brest, 1880 – Chapleau, Ontario, 1913) was a French writer whose novel Maria Chapdelaine made him the most widely associated name with French-speaking Canada. His life was short, and he spent a little under two years in North America, yet his book became a fixture of Quebec's literary identity.

Raised in Paris, Hémon attended the Montaigne and Louis-le-Grand secondary schools. He worked as a bilingual secretary for several shipping agencies and from 1904 contributed to a Parisian sports newspaper. After studying law and oriental languages at the Sorbonne, he moved to London, where he also worked as a journalist. In 1911 he crossed to Canada, arriving first in Montreal, and later settled in the Lac Saint-Jean region, where he worked on a farm and wrote the novel that would bring him fame.

He wrote the book between 1912 and 1913, and he died before it found its audience: he was struck by a train at Chapleau, Ontario, in July 1913. The novel appeared in serial form in Paris in 1914, as a book in Quebec in 1916, and in its definitive edition in 1921. Its sympathetic portrait of rural Quebec families and the land they settled sold extremely well and has been translated into more than twenty languages. Critics have since questioned how much a writer with so brief a stay deserves a place among Canadian authors, but his name remains central to Quebec's literary memory.