As a journalist, political critic, novelist, travel writer, and publisher Jacques Hébert has influenced Quebec's Quiet Revolution during the past generation. Critical of the regime of Maurice Le Noblet Duplessis and of Quebec's judicial and penal systems, he has devoted several books to these social concerns. Complementing these "regional" books, the travel books cover almost every continent--Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas--thereby extending Hébert's Quebecois perspective to cover most of the rest of the world. As the head of Les Editions du Jour, Hébert has published the work of Marie-Claire Blais, which has helped gain an international reputation for his publishing house.

Born in Montreal to Louis-Philippe Hébert, a physician, and Denise Saint-Onge Hébert, Jacques Hébert received his classical college training at Collège Sainte-Marie and then spent two "years in Prince Edward Island at...