Editing Mordecai Richler (section)

==''The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz''==

Richler published his fourth novel, ''[[The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (novel)|The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz]]'', in 1959. The book featured a frequent Richler theme: Jewish life in the 1930s and 40s in the neighbourhood of Montreal east of [[Mount Royal|Mount Royal Park]] on and about St. Urbain Street and [[Saint Lawrence Boulevard|Saint Laurent Boulevard]] (known colloquially as "The Main"). Richler wrote of the neighbourhood and its people, chronicling the hardships and disabilities they faced as a Jewish minority.

{{blockquote|text=To a middle-class stranger, it is true, one street would have seemed as squalid as the next. On each corner a cigar store, a grocery, and a fruit man. Outside staircases everywhere. Winding ones, wooden ones, rusty and risky ones. Here a prized lot of grass splendidly barbered, there a spitefully weedy patch. An endless repetition of precious peeling balconies and waste lots making the occasional gap here and there. |source=''The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz'', Penguin Books, 1964, p. 13}}

Following the publication of ''Duddy Kravitz'', according to ''The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature'', Richler became "one of the foremost writers of his generation".<ref>{{cite book|editor1-last=Benson|editor1-first=Eugene|editor2-last=Toye|editor2-first=William|author-last=Brown|author-first=Ruseell|chapter=Richler, Mordecai|title=The Oxford Companion to Literature|location=Don Mills, Ontario|publisher=Oxford University Press|publication-date=1997|edition=2|page=1000}}</ref>