Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Louis-Ferdinand Céline was the pen name of Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, a French writer and physician born in Courbevoie on 27 May 1894 and died on 1 July 1961. He was wounded in the First World War, travelled widely, and later worked as a doctor among the poor of the Paris suburbs. His first novel, Voyage au bout de la nuit, appeared in 1932 and made him famous. Its bitter humour, its spoken-sounding rhythms and its black view of war, colonialism and work changed French prose and influenced writers well beyond France. In the late 1930s he published violently antisemitic pamphlets, and during the Second World War he sided with collaborationist circles. He fled France in 1944, spent time in exile, and was later allowed to return. His late novels recount that flight in a restless, fragmented style. Readers still debate how to weigh his literary innovation against his shameful political writings, and that tension keeps him a difficult but important figure.