Curated playlist
French male novelists
- VoltaireFrench writer, historian, and philosopher (1694–1778)
- 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…
- Gustave FlaubertSometimes Gustave Flaubert spent a full week finishing a single page. He worked in sullen solitude, never satisfied with what he had composed. The critic Walter Pater called him the "martyr of style." Born in Rouen on the 12th of December…
- 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 spent more than two decades producing one of the most provocative publishing…
- 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. More than two million people joined his funeral procession from the Arc de Triomphe to the Panthéon, the largest…
- 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 great-grandfather a monkey," he said. "You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends."…
- 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. His father's lineage traced back to Richard de la Pole, a Yorkist claimant to the English…
- 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 would call him "France's greatest contemporary man of letters." He wrote more than…
- 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…
- 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 single adjective that bears his name in dictionaries to this day: Rabelaisian,…
- 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…
- 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 than a hundred pseudonyms, signing letters as "William Crocodile" or "Don Phlegm"…
- 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…