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N―s blancs d'Amérique (1968), a Marxist analysis of Québec history and a program for the future, was written as an autobiography by Pierre Vallières while he was confined in a Manhattan jail for FLQ activities. The book argued that French Canadians workers are exploited by capitalism and colonized by anglophone elites.
The book dramatizes Pierre Vallières’ impoverished, frustrated childhood during the Duplessis era as the son of working-class parents in Longueuil-Annexe. He has a checkered career as a philosophy student, office worker, Franciscan postulant and writer. Vallières is a friend of the poet Gaston Miron and of the intelligentsia associated with Cité Libre, Parti Pris and Le Devoir. He speaks of his "conversion" to Marxism and his involvement in the Front de Libération du Québec after a trip to France and Spain.
To Vallières, Quebec's working class reveals the characteristics of a colonized people, a condition of being that he felt could be altered only through violent revolution. The work was revised and expanded in 1969, and it was translated in 1971 as White N―s of America.
