Short answers, pulled from the story.
Journey to the End of the Night (Voyage au bout de la nuit), published in October 1932, is Céline's most celebrated work. It won the Prix Renaudot and sold 50,000 copies in the two months after it narrowly lost the Prix Goncourt to Mazeline's Les Loups.
Céline was tried in absentia and found guilty in February 1951 of activities harmful to French national defence. His conviction rested on his membership in the collaborationist Cercle Européen and his letters to collaborationist journals during the German occupation. A French military tribunal granted him amnesty in April 1951 on the basis of his status as a disabled war veteran.
Céline published three antisemitic polemics: Bagatelles pour un massacre (Trifles for a Massacre) in 1937, L'École des cadavres (School for Corpses) in November 1938, and Les beaux draps (A Fine Mess) in February 1941. The first sold 75,000 copies up to the end of the war and advocated a military alliance with Nazi Germany.
Céline was born Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches on the 27th of May 1894 in Courbevoie, outside Paris. He adopted the pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline, taking Céline from his maternal grandmother, Marguerite-Louise-Céline Guilloux.
Céline's unpublished manuscripts had been missing since he fled Paris in 1944. In March 2020, a Libération journalist named Jean-Pierre Thibaudat handed them over to Nanterre police; this was revealed publicly in August 2021. The collection included La Volonté du roi Krogold, Londres, and 6,000 unpublished pages of already published works. Gallimard published Guerre in May 2022 and Londres in October 2022.
Céline influenced a wide range of writers. Alain Robbe-Grillet cited him as a major influence on the nouveau roman movement, and Günter Grass showed a debt to his style. Patrick Modiano produced a parody of Céline's style in his debut novel La place de l'étoile. Biographer Patrick McCarthy and critic O'Connell also identify Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs, and Kurt Vonnegut among American writers Céline shaped.