The Juneberry Tree

Jacques Ferron (1921-1985), playwright, storyteller, novelist, physician and wit, is a winner of the Prix France-Québec, the Governor General's Award and other major literary prizes. His father was a Liberal Party organizer, and Jacques Ferron (brother of Marcelle Ferron) was early attracted to political opposition. His earliest works, published in the late 1940s in Montréal newspapers and directed against the Duplessis regime, carried the profoundly humanist and socialist stamp that helped earn him a reputation as the Voltaire of Québec letters. His commitment to socialist principles, partly owing to his first wife's affiliation with the Communist Party, was expressed in his involvement with left-wing magazines (Situations, La Revue socialiste, Parti pris) and in his political campaign as a candidate for the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) in the 1958 federal election. He was later approached by the Rassemblement pour l'indépendance nationale and was a RIN candidate in the 1966 provincial election. Meanwhile, in 1963 he and friends founded the RHINOCEROS PARTY, which turned its main weapon - irony - on the increasingly dominant power of the federal government. His plays and fiction are satirical expositions of predominant attitudes in Quebec. Wit and fantasy are his weapons. Time and space are transcended. Fellow novelist Victor-Lévy Beaulieu remarks that he has great admiration for Ferron, who, like his character Tinamer, is born of a lingering dream which he too has not yet left behind.