Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Louis-Ferdinand Céline was the pen name of Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches, a French novelist, polemicist and physician who lived from 1894 to 1961. His first novel, Journey to the End of the Night (1932), won the Prix Renaudot and divided critics because of its pessimistic picture of the human condition and a prose style built on working-class speech. In later novels such as Death on the Installment Plan (1936), Guignol's Band (1944) and Castle to Castle (1957) he pushed this distinctive spoken, broken style further, and the critic Maurice Nadeau compared his achievement for French with what Joyce did for English. From 1937 he also wrote antisemitic polemics and urged an alliance with Nazi Germany. After the Allied landing in Normandy he fled to Germany and then Denmark, was convicted of collaboration by a French court in 1951, and was soon pardoned. He is widely ranked among the greatest French novelists of the twentieth century, yet remains a controversial figure.