Albert Laberge
See also: Laberge
Albert Laberge (February 18th 1871 - April 4th 1960) was a Québécois writer.
Born with Beauharnois, in a family of farmers, he studies at the school Saint-Clement and the Sainte-Marie College of Montreal. He is returned school in 1892 to have read prohibited authors. Laberge will work thereafter in a law firm.
Member of the literary School of Montreal since 1909, he becomes sports editor for the Press, a station which he will keep until in 1932. In 1910, it Marie with Églantine Dubé.
Laberge is the first writer Canadian-French to make Réalisme. Its first novel, heading “Scouine” and published in 1918, is that which deserves to him a place in the Québécois Littérature.
Its description of the agricultural landscape was qualified of “anti-soil” because it represents the hard peasants like beings ignares and méprisables, persons in charge of their own ruin.
This representation of nature is opposed to that of Félicité Angers and Louis Hémon, which praises the merits of the countryside in the kind Agriculturiste.
That was worth to him a severe criticism on behalf of Camille Roy and of Mgr Paul Bruchési, which were then the critics of the letters of the time. The Canadian edition being then developed little, all its works are signed with its hand.
Passed in the lapse of memory, Laberge will travel and continue to publish discreetly in the realistic kind until the end of its life, whereas the other authors of its generation pass to a more personal style. However, Philippe Panneton will succeed to him in the anti-soil with its novel Thirty arpents. Laberge is redécouvert in the Années 1950 by Gilles Marcotte. He dies in 1960. The literary criticism of the Quiet revolution will do of him one of the best Canadian novelists. Gerard Bessette published his anthology in 1963.
The Université of Ottawa has funds Albert-Laberge. Gilbert Sicotte carried out a film on its life in 1988.