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Bernard Epps was an author, historian, columnist, cartoonist and editor who settled in and came to focus his work on the Eastern Townships region of Quebec, Canada. The author of seven books, Epps was best known for the bucolic novel Pilgarlic the Death (1967) and the historical novel The Outlaw of Megantic (1973).

His byline was also seen regularly on extensive historical stories about Townshippers, particularly their nineteenth-century history, in The Record (Sherbrooke) and The Townships Sun -- a monthly which he also edited in the 1980s. Over a thousand of his non-fiction pieces about the Townships appeared in the region’s media.

For well over a decade in the 1980s and 1990s, he penned a current affairs/opinion/humor column for The Record under the pseudonym Tadeusz Letarte, winning the Best Column prize from the Quebec Community Newspapers Association; his identity was only disclosed years later.

Since 1997, many of his unpublished manuscripts and original personal papers have been preserved in a special collections archive at the Eastern Townships Resource Centre at Bishop's University in Sherbrooke, Quebec.

Education and Early Career

Born in England to working-class parents, Bernard Epps migrated to the U.S. as a teen with his parents and two sisters so that his father could work on the farm of a relative in Ohio. After attending high school in Eastern Ohio, he did drafting, also known as technical drawing, to pay his tuition for the Cartoonists and Illustrators School in New York City, where he studied under founder Burne Hogarth.

Epps stayed in the U.S. while his parents acquired their own farm in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, Canada, and he began selling short fiction to publications in 1961, including a handful of crime stories to the monthly Manhunt, a hardboiled digest of the 1950s and 1960s which billed itself as the “world's most popular crime-fiction magazine” and featured such writers as Mickey Spillane, Donald E. Westlake, and Evan Hunter. Other literary magazines which published Epps’ work in the 1960s were the New Mexico Quarterly, Wormwood Review, and International Storyteller. By the end of the decade, Epps had purchased his father’s farm in Quebec and begun to research and write about the Eastern Townships, leaving only occasionally on forays to big cities to do drafting work.

Key Works

Epps’ first novel, Pilgarlic the Death, was published in hardcover in 1967 by Macmillan. It was re-published in paperback in 1980 by Quadrant Editions, and the Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada claims that Epps “is most celebrated for” this work. In early 2019, an original stage adaptation was produced under the auspices of the Eaton Corner Museum of Cookshire-Eaton, Quebec.

The novel is set in a fictitious, densely-forested, lumber and farm community which closely resembles (with only slightly altered place names) the rural counties in the Eastern Townships which Epps and his parents knew first-hand. The colorful characters of the novel include an itinerant preacher, a mischievous old man skilled at barter, a game warden defied by illegal hunters, a hermit, and an umarried couple living in a former church. The ways they cope with the milestones of life, the changing seasons, and the often harsh realities of living close to nature form the basis of what the literary journal Matrix calls “a black comedy set in a mythic terrain.” With figures like Long George, Hell Fire the preacher, Dougal the School, Alan the Pigman (aka ‘the Lord Mayor’), Milly-of-the-Hill, John the Law, and Old O. Hugh, Epps “peopled the Eastern Townships with the character types of folk legend,” writes A History of Canadian Literature, “and so perceived how European folk tradition continued to show up in Canadian life.”.

Epps followed Pilgarlic with the teleplay Hands, a half-hour drama he wrote from his short story about the frustrating struggle of a farmer triyng to eke out a living on land left to him in the Eastern Townships. Hands aired on Sept. 23, 1971 on Canada’s national public TV network, CBC Television, as the first episode of producer David Peddie’s three-season anthology series To See Ourselves -- a series designed to dramatize the work of Canadian writers such as Alice Munro, Stephen Leacock, Mordecai Richler, W.O. Mitchell, and David French. Epps’ TV drama was directed by Peter Carter and starred Robert Rivard, Deborah Turnbull, Murray Westgate, Tommy Tweed, Eric House, and Guy L'Ecuyer. Hands was also re-broadcast on July 19, 1973.

Epps’ second published novel was The Outlaw of Megantic (McClelland & Stewart, 1973, reprinted in 1980, 1982, and 1988) a fictionalization of the true story of the legendary 19th-century Eastern Townships outlaw Donald Morrison. “England has Robin Hood. Scotland has Rob Roy. And the Eastern Townships has Donald Morrison,” reviewer Don Young declared about the historical figure in Townships Week in 1980. Of Scottish immigrant stock, the Quebec-born Donald Morrison had spent time as a cowboy in the North American west and when his father’s farm was repossessed over a financial dispute, a conflict over the property escalated until Morrison shot a special constable sent to arrest him. An 11-month manhunt for Morrison began, during which time he was repeatedly hidden from authorities by sympathetic locals in his rural community.

As the author of The Outlaw of Megantic and a historian on the Eastern Townships, Epps was interviewed in the 1999 Canadian-British TV documentary on Morrison, The Megantic Outlaw, directed by James Cullingham. The documentary aired on BBC Alba (a Scottish Gaelic-language TV channel) and was also included in the TV series The Canadians, with an introduction by longtime Canadian broadcaster and producer Patrick Watson.

Historical Non-fiction

Besides regular feature articles for The Record and The Townships Sun, Epps also wrote historical pieces for periodicals such as Green Mountain Trading Post, Early Canadian Life, and the Journal of Eastern Townships Studies, and gave readings and lectures to schools and other groups in the Eastern Townships. Two collections of Epps’ historical pieces for The Townships Sun were re-published in book form by Sun Books as Tales of the Townships (1980) and More Tales of the Townships (1985).

He also wrote a full-length history, The Eastern Townships Adventure, Vol. 1, published by Pigwidgeon Press in 1992, most of which was reprinted in installments in the monthly magazine The Townships Sun in the first four years after his death, beginning in Nov. 2007.

Other Books

The first two chapters of his novel Rib of Eve appeared in the Champlain College Lennoxville literary journal Matrix (Summer 1980) and an excerpt from his novel about Hercules, Bull, also ran in Matrix (Spring 1986). His published books include The Royal Rifles of Canada in Hong Kong, 1941-1954 (as editor, 1981); Second Blessing: a centennial history of the Sherbrooke Hospital, 1888-1988 (bilingual, 1988); and a collection in 2000 of autobiographical poetry, Please Sir, I’d Rather Be Ravished: Selected Rhymes and Reasons (Illustrated), a meditation on aging and on his life so far. His final completed book was about Arthur L. Howard, a.k.a. 'Gat,' a military expert who made history in the 19th century using an early machine gun for the Canadian militia.

References

Willam H. New, ed., Dictionary of Literary Biography: Vol. 53, Canadian Writers Since 1960 (Farmington Hills: Gale Research, 1986)

Allan Weiss, ed., A Comprehensive Bibliography of English-Canadian Short Stories 1950-1983 (Toronto: ECW Press, 1988)