The Town Below
- Publisher
- Dundurn Press
- Initial publish date
- Mar 2013
- Category
- Classics, Historical, Religious
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781459700055
- Publish Date
- Mar 2013
- List Price
- $9.99
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781554888030
- Publish Date
- Mar 2013
- List Price
- $26.99
Add it to your shelf
Where to buy it
Description
The Town Below changed the face of Québécois literature.
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 authors
Roger Lemelin (1919-1992) was born in working-class Quebec City. He published eight novels and numerous short stories and essays and won several awards for his books. In addition to the awards he won for The Town Below, he also adapted his second novel, Les Plouffe, into the popular CBC-TV show The Plouffe Family, which ran from 1953 to 1959 in French and English.
Michael Gnarowski co-edited The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada, compiled The Concise Bibliography of E nglish Canadian Literature, and edited the Critical Views on Canadian Writers Series for McGraw-Hill Ryerson. He has written for Encyclopedia Americana, The Canadian Encyclopedia, The McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Biography, and The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry. Gnarowski is professor emeritus at Carleton University in Ottawa.
Editorial Reviews
The historical aspects of The Town Below, along with Lemelin’s cast of characters, offers the new reader an enchanting way to learn about a Canada of long ago.
Toronto Star
Other titles by
Other titles by
The Deserter
Flying a Red Kite
The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada
Essential Commentary on Poetry in English, Third edition
Making of Modern Poetry in Canada
Essential Commentary on Poetry in English, Third edition
God's Sparrows
Ringing the Changes
An Autobiography
In Flanders Fields and Other Poems
The Voyageur Classic Canadian Fiction 7-Book Bundle
All Else Is Folly / Pauline Johnson / The Town Below / Self Condemned / Storm Below / The Yellow Briar / Maria Chapdelaine
The Voyageur Canadian Biographies 5-Book Bundle
The Firebrand / Mrs. Simcoe's Diary / The Scalpel, the Sword / The Men of the Last Frontier / Pilgrims of the Wild
The Voyageur Canadian Essays & Criticism 2-Book Bundle
Selected Writings, A.J.M. Smith / The Kindred of the Wild
