Leon Rooke was born in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, in 1934 and attended the University of North Carolina in the late 1950s and early 1960s. His Southern background as well as the similarities regarding the themes and techniques of his writing to, for instance, the work of Flannery O'Connor have led critics to count Rooke among the Southern writers of the United States. Yet while Rooke considers O'Connor's and other Southern writers’ oeuvres part of his stylistic training (see Rooke in Hancock 1981, 116, 120), he refuses to be identified as a writer in this particular tradition because he does not want to be associated with Southern racial politics: “Then came the sixties. Martin Luther King singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ and a strong sense of too many in the older order singing ‘You Shall Not.’ And that did something to my sense of loyalty to the region. It took away some of the ghost's power” (Rooke in Hancock, 120).

Thus, having moved from the United States to Victoria, British Columbia, in 1969, Rooke has been more aptly described as “an American who has adopted the Canadian West Coast as his home” (Gadpaille 1988, 111); in 1981 he called himself “now Canadian” (Rooke in Hancock, 146). Rooke has since lived at various places in Canada. Nonetheless, when his writing is appropriated by a national literary tradition, Rooke — as a member of the large group of authors who have emigrated to Canada from all over the world since the 1960s — claims allegiance with an international standard: “The only tradition I dimly perceive is that one where we find the writer attempting to write well and knowing from the start the likelihood of failure. … And it is a territory without boundaries or borders, which is to say that it can be found anywhere” (Rooke in Hancock, 109). In accord also with recent redefinitions of Canadian identity, Rooke's literary work is therefore considered to have played “a crucial role in anticipating … a shift away from the nationalist paradigm of representation, based on recognizably Canadian themes and voices, to the current post-nationalist view of Canada as a pluralistic, multicultural and multiracial society” (Gorjup 1999, 269).