Curated playlist
20th-century French novelists
- André BretonAndré Breton defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism" - a phrase that landed in print in 1924 and reoriented the entire direction of modern art. He was a French poet and writer from Tinchebray, a small town in Normandy, and by the…
- Jules VerneJules Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking below Agatha Christie and above William Shakespeare. That is a strange place for a man whose English readers, for over a century, were handed something…
- Jean-Paul SartreJean-Paul Sartre was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature, and he refused it. He said a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution. The prize was announced on the 22nd of October 1964. Nine days earlier, on the…
- Albert CamusAlbert Camus was born on the 7th of November 1913 in Mondovi, a working-class town in French Algeria, to a mother who was deaf and illiterate and a father he would never meet. Lucien Camus, a poor agricultural laborer, died in combat…
- Jean GenetJean Genet spent his first seven months in the care of a prostitute mother before she placed him for adoption, and from that beginning he built one of the most fiercely original bodies of work in twentieth-century French literature. He was…
- Simone de BeauvoirSimone de Beauvoir did not consider herself a philosopher, and at the time of her death in 1986 the world did not call her one either. Yet she wrote the sentence that opened a century of argument: "One is not born woman but becomes woman."…
- Louis-Ferdinand CélineLouis-Ferdinand Céline completed the second draft of his final novel on the 30th of June 1961. He died at home the very next day, of a ruptured aneurysm. The timing was almost too neat for a man who spent his life insisting that death was…
- Jean GiraudouxJean Giraudoux died in Paris on the 31st of January 1944, at the age of 61, under circumstances that have never been fully explained. There has been speculation that he was poisoned. He is buried in the Cimetière de Passy. For a man whose…
- Georges BatailleGeorges Bataille was born on the 10th of September 1897 in Billom, a small town in the Auvergne region of France, and by the time he died on the 8th of July 1962 he had spent a lifetime writing things that made people deeply uncomfortable.…
- Raymond QueneauRaymond Queneau once calculated that a reader working through his book A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, around the clock every day without stopping, would need 190,258,751 years to finish it. That number is not a joke. It is not a…
- Éric RohmerÉric Rohmer wore a false moustache to the New York premiere of one of his films. The man who would be called "the most durable filmmaker of the French New Wave" by The Daily Telegraph was so committed to guarding his private life that he…
- Jeanine DelpechJeanine Delpech was born on the 1st of August 1905 at the Château du Prieuré in Évecquemont. Her father, Edmond Jean Frédéric Marie Delpech, was a lawyer. She died on the 3rd of July 1992, in the 7th arrondissement of Paris. In the…