Curated category
French male novelists
- Voltaire"This is no time to make new enemies." Those words are attributed to Voltaire on his deathbed, when a priest urged him to renounce Satan.
- Jules VerneJules Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking below Agatha Christie and above William Shakespeare.
- Gustave FlaubertSometimes Gustave Flaubert spent a full week finishing a single page. He worked in sullen solitude, never satisfied with what he had composed.
- Denis DiderotDenis Diderot was born on the 5th of October 1713 in Langres, Champagne, the son of a cutler named Didier Diderot. He died on the 31st of July 1784, having…
- Victor HugoVictor Hugo died on the 22nd of May 1885, at 50 Avenue Victor Hugo in Paris. He was 83 years old, and he died of pneumonia.
- Alexandre DumasAlexandre Dumas once silenced a man who had insulted his ancestry with a single retort. "My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my…
- MontesquieuMontesquieu, born Charles Louis de Secondat on the 18th of January 1689, grew up in a château 25 kilometres south of Bordeaux, in southwest France.
- André GideAndré Paul Guillaume Gide was born in Paris on the 22nd of November 1869, and by the time he died on the 19th of February 1951, his New York Times obituary…
- 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.
- François RabelaisFrançois Rabelais died in Paris in 1553, leaving behind four books that the Sorbonne had condemned, a fifth whose authorship scholars still argue over, and a…
- 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.
- StendhalStendhal collapsed on a Paris street on the 23rd of March 1842 and died a few hours later. He had spent decades writing under false names, hiding behind more…
- 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…
- 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…