Dave's BooksThis is my attempt to put together a list of the great works of French Canada.
| Author | Works | Year |
| Aubert de Gaspé, Philippe-Joseph | Les Anciens Canadiens (Canadians of Old) | 1863 |
| Nelligan, Émile | Selected Poems | 1899 |
| Hémon, Louis | Maria Chapdelaine | 1916 |
| Savard, Félix-Antoine | Menaud, maître-draveur (Master of the River) | 1937 |
| Ringuet (Philippe Panneton) | Trente Arpents (Thirty Acres) | 1938 |
| Lemelin, Roger | Au pied de la pente douce (The Town Below) | 1944 |
| Roy, Gabrielle | Bonheur d'occasion (Tin Flute) | 1945 |
| Langevin, André | Poussière sur la ville (Dust Over the City) | 1953 |
| Leclerc, Félix | Le Fou de l'Ile (The Madman, the Kite & the Island) | 1958 |
| Garneau, Hector de Saint-Denys | Regards et jeux dans l'espace (in Poésies complètes) | 1960 |
| Hébert, Anne | Poèmes | 1960 |
| Kamouraska | 1970 | |
| Aquin, Hubert | Prochain Épisode | 1965 |
| Blais, Marie-Claire | Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel | 1965 |
| Ducharme, Réjean | L'Avalée des avalés (The Swallower Swallowed) | 1966 |
| Carrier, Roch | La Guerre, Yes, Sir! | 1968 |
| Floralie, Where Are You? | 1969 | |
| Is It the Sun, Philibert? | 1970 | |
| Tremblay, Michel | Les Belles-Soeurs | 1968 |
| La Grosse femme d'à côté est enceinte | 1978 | |
| Thérèse and Pierrette and the Little Hanging Angel | 1980 | |
| The Duchess and the Commoner | 1982 | |
| News from Édouard | 1984 | |
| The First Quarter of the Moon | 1989 | |
| A Thing of Beauty | 1997 | |
| Miron, Gaston | L'Homme Rapaillé (no evidence so far that this has been translated) | 1970 |
| Maillet, Antonine | La Sagouine | 1971 |
| The Tale of Don l'Orignal | 1972 | |
| Pélagie-la-Charette | 1979 | |
| Ferron, Jacques | Tales from an Uncertain Country | 1972 |
| Brossard, Nicole | Le Centre blanc: poèmes 1965-1975 (no evidence so far that this has been translated) | 1975 |
| Beauchemin, Yves | Le Matou (The Alley Cat) | 1981 |
| Cousture, Arlette | Les filles de Caleb (Emilie) | 1985 |
I used four main sources to pull this list together:
In general, if at least three of the sources thought it was an important work, I thought I ought to read it. Then I ran the list past a few friends who were educated in Québec, to see what they thought. Most people thought it was a reasonable starting point, though I did add a couple of things as a result of those discussions.
With the exception of some of the poetry (Gaston Miron's and Nicole Brossard's), everything is available in English, either directly in my big city Canadian library (Ottawa) or through inter-library loan. Most of the works are relatively short (a lot of them are well under 200 pages), so this is not a huge multi-year project. French Canada does not seem to have produced a Proust - or at least not one who is widely regarded as significant - so working through the list does not involve reading any 4300-page novels.
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