Louis Aragon
French writer Louis Aragon founded literary surrealism.
Louis Aragon, a major figure in the avant-garde movements, shaped visual culture in the 20th century. His long career as a poet, novelist, Communist polemicist and bona fide war hero secured his place in the pantheon of greats.
With André Breton and Phillipe Soupault, Aragon launched the movement and through Paysan de Paris (Paris Peasant), his novel of 1926, produced the considered defining text of the movement.
Aragon parted company with the movement in the early 1930s, devoted his energies to the Communist party, and went to produce a vast body that combined elements of the social avant-garde.
Aragon, a leading influence on the shaping of the novel in the early to mid-20th centu
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Jean Giono
Jean Giono, the only son of a cobbler and a laundress, was one of France’s greatest writers. His prodigious literary output included stories, essays, poetry, plays, film scripts, translations and over thirty novels, many of which have been translated into English.
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Giono was a pacifist, and was twice imprisoned in France at the outset and conclusion of World War II.
He remained tied to Provence and Manosque, the little city where he was born in 1895 and, in 1970, died.
Giono was awarded the Prix Bretano, the Prix de Monaco (for the most outstanding
collected work by a French writer), the Légion d’Honneur, and he was
a member of the Académie Goncourt. -
Arlette Farge
Arlette Farge est historienne spécialiste du XVIIIe siècle. Elle a publié de nombreux ouvrages, parmi lesquels La Vie fragile. Violence, pouvoirs et solidarités à Paris au XVIIIe siècle, Le Goût de l'archive, et, avec Michel Foucault, Le Désordre des familles. Lettres de cachet des Archives de la Bastille au XVIIIe siècle.
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François-René de Chateaubriand
François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand was a French writer, politician and diplomat. He is considered the founder of Romanticism in French literature.
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He has also been mistakenly given the forename François-Auguste in an 1811 edition, but signed all his worked as just Chateaubriand or M. le vicomte de Chateaubriand. -
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Gérard de Nerval
Gérard de Nerval was the nom-de-plume of the French poet, essayist and translator Gérard Labrunie, one of the most essentially Romantic French poets.
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Gérard de Nerval, nom de plume de Gérard Labrunie, écrivain et poète français. Figure majeure du romantisme français, il est essentiellement connu pour ses poèmes et ses nouvelles. -
Longus
Longus, sometimes Longos (Greek: Λόγγος), was a Greek novelist and romancer, and author of Daphnis and Chloe. Very little is known of his life, and it is assumed that he lived on the isle of Lesbos during the 2nd century AD.
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Achilles Tatius
Achilles Tatius (Greek: Ἀχιλλεὺς Τάτιος) of Alexandria was a Roman era Greek writer whose fame is attached to his only surviving work, the ancient Greek novel or romance The Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon.
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Georges de Peyrebrune
Mathilde-Marie Georgina Élisabeth de Peyrebrune, better known as George de Peyrebrune was a French novelist.
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Mathilde-Marie Georgina Élisabeth de Peyrebrune, dite George de Peyrebrune était une romancière française. -
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist, well-known for his development of structural anthropology. He was born in Belgium to French parents who were living in Brussels at the time, but he grew up in Paris. His father was an artist, and a member of an intellectual French Jewish family. Lévi-Strauss studied at the University of Paris. From 1935-9 he was Professor at the University of Sao Paulo making several expeditions to central Brazil. Between 1942-1945 he was Professor at the New School for Social Research. In 1950 he became Director of Studies at the Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes. In 1959 Lévi-Strauss assumed the Chair of Social Anthroplogy at the College de France. His books include The Raw and the Cooked, The Savage Mind,
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André Breton
After World War I, French poet and literary theorist André Breton began to link at first with Dadaism but broke with that movement to write the first manifesto of surrealism in 1924.
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People best know this theorist as the principal founder. His writings include the Surrealist Manifesto (Manifeste du surréalisme), in which he defined this "pure psychic automatism."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3... -
Marguerite de Navarre
Marguerite de Navarre, also known as Marguerite d'Angoulême and Margaret of Navarre, was the queen consort of King Henry II of Navarre. As patron of humanists and reformers, and as an author in her own right, she was an outstanding figure of the French Renaissance. Samuel Putnam called her "The First Modern Woman".
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Georges Canguilhem
Georges Canguilhem was a French philosopher and physician who specialized in epistemology and the philosophy of science.
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José Sanchis Sinisterra
José Sanchis Sinisterra (Valencia, 28 de junio de 1940) es un dramaturgo y director teatral español. Es uno de los autores más premiados y representados del teatro español contemporáneo y un gran renovador de escena española, siendo también conocido por su labor docente y pedagógica en el campo teatral. Vinculado al estudio y a la enseñanza de la literatura, ha reivindicado siempre la doble naturaleza –literaria y escénica– del texto dramático. Además de sus obras, en su faceta de investigador y divulgador, Sanchis Sinisterra ha escrito numerosos artículos sobre teatro y participado en diversos coloquios y congresos dedicados al arte dramático.
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Comte de Lautréamont
Comte de Lautréamont (French pronunciation: [lotʁeaˈmɔ̃]) was the pseudonym of Isidore Lucien Ducasse, a Uruguayan-born French poet. Little is known about his life and he wished to leave no memoirs. He died at the age of 24 in Paris.
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His only works, Les Chants de Maldoror and Poésies, had a major influence on modern literature, particularly on the Surrealists (similarly to Baudelaire and Rimbaud) and the Situationists. Comte de Lautréamont is one of the poètes maudits and a precursor to Surrealism. -
Marguerite Duras
Marguerite Germaine Marie Donnadieu , known as Marguerite Duras, was a French novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and experimental filmmaker. Her script for the film Hiroshima mon amour (1959) earned her a nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards.
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André Malraux
Malraux was born in Paris during 1901, the son of Fernand-Georges Malraux and Berthe Lamy (Malraux). His parents separated during 1905 and eventually divorced. He was raised by his mother and maternal grandmother, Berthe and Adrienne Lamy in the small town of Bondy. His father, a stockbroker, committed suicide in 1930. Andre had Tourette's Syndrome during his childhood, resulting in motor and vocal tics.
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At the age of 21, Malraux left for Cambodia with his new wife Clara Goldschmidt. In Cambodia, he undertook an exploratory expedition into the Cambodian jungle. On his return he was arrested by French colonial authorities for removing bas-reliefs from one of the temples he discovered. Banteay Srei (The French government itself had removed lar -
Cyrano de Bergerac
Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac, French satirist, and dramatist whose works combining political satire and science-fantasy inspired a number of later writers. He has been the basis of many romantic but unhistorical legends, of which the best known is Edmond Rostand’s play Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), in which he is portrayed as a gallant and brilliant but shy and ugly lover, possessed (as in fact he was) of a remarkably large nose.
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As a young man, Cyrano joined the company of guards and was wounded at the Siege of Arras in 1640. But he gave up his military career in the following year to study under the philosopher and mathematician Pierre Gassendi. Under the influence of Gassendi’s scientific theories and libertine philosophy, Cyrano wrote his tw -
Pierre de Beaumarchais
Le Barbier de Séville (1775) and Le Mariage de Figaro (1784), the comic plays, best-known works of French writer Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, inspired Gioacchino Antonio Rossini and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to operas.
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Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, a musician, diplomat, horticulturalist, satirist, and American revolutionary, made watches, invented, inventor, fled, spied, published, dealt arms, and financed.
Born a son to a provincial watchmaker , Beaumarchais rose in society as an influential inventor and music teacher in the court of Louis XV. He made a number of important business and social contacts in various roles as a diplomat and spy,and earned a considerable fortune before a series of costly court battles jeo -
Madame d'Aulnoy
Madame d'Aulnoy (Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d'Aulnoy) (1650/1651–4 January 1705) was a French writer known for her fairy tales. When she termed her works contes de fées (fairy tales, or literally, "Tales of the Fairies."), she originated the term that is now generally used for the genre. Her 'fairy tales' were written in a style suitable for entertaining in adult salon gatherings, and not with a child audience in mind.
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d'Aulnoy also wrote works of history (although not using modern attitudes to historical accuracy), pseudo-memoirs, and a few historical novels.
Born a member of the noble Le Jumel de Barneville family, she was known as the baronne d'Aulnoy by marriage. -
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos (1741-1803) was a French novelist, official and army general, best known for writing the epistolary novel Les Liaisons dangereuses.
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A unique case in French literature, he was for a long time considered to be as scandalous a writer as the Marquis de Sade or Nicolas-Edme Rétif. He was a military officer with no illusions about human relations, and an amateur writer; however, his initial plan was to "write a work which departed from the ordinary, which made a noise, and which would remain on earth after his death"; from this point of view he mostly attained his goals, with the fame of his masterwork Les Liaisons dangereuses . It is one of the masterpieces of novelistic literature of the 18th century, -
Paul Éluard
Paul Éluard was the pen name of Eugène Émile Paul Grindel. French poet, a founder of Surrealism with Louis Aragon and André Breton among others, one of the important lyrical poets of the 20th century. Éluard rejected later Surrealism and joined the French Communist Party. Many of his works reflect the major events of the century, such as the World Wars, the Resistance against the Nazis, and the political and social ideals of the 20th-century.
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Carlo Goldoni
Carlo Osvaldo Goldoni was an Italian playwright and librettist from the Republic of Venice. His works include some of Italy's most famous and best-loved plays. Audiences have admired the plays of Goldoni for their ingenious mix of wit and honesty. His plays offered his contemporaries images of themselves, often dramatizing the lives, values, and conflicts of the emerging middle classes. Though he wrote in French and Italian, his plays make rich use of the Venetian language, regional vernacular, and colloquialisms. Goldoni also wrote under the pen name and title "Polisseno Fegeio, Pastor Arcade," which he claimed in his memoirs the "Arcadians of Rome" bestowed on him.
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Gérard de Nerval
Gérard de Nerval was the nom-de-plume of the French poet, essayist and translator Gérard Labrunie, one of the most essentially Romantic French poets.
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Gérard de Nerval, nom de plume de Gérard Labrunie, écrivain et poète français. Figure majeure du romantisme français, il est essentiellement connu pour ses poèmes et ses nouvelles. -
Albert Cohen
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Born Abraham Albert Cohen in Corfu, Greece, in 1895, as part of an important Sephardic Jewish community on the island. Albert’s parents, who owned a soap factory, moved to Marseille, France when he was a child. Albert Cohen discusses this period in his novel Le livre de ma mère (The Book of my Mother). He studied at a private Catholic school. In 1904, he started high school at Lycée Thiers, and graduated in 1913.
In 1914, he left Marseille for Geneva, Switzerland and enrolled in Law school. He graduated from Law School in 1917 and enrolled in Literature School in 1917 until 1919. In 1919, He became a Swiss citizen. That same year he married Elisabeth Broch -
Guillaume Apollinaire
Italian-French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, originally Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky, led figures in avant-garde literary and artistic circles.
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A Polish mother bore Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, this known writer and critic.
People credit him among the foremost of the early 20th century with coining the word surrealism and with writing Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1917), the play of the earliest works, so described and later used as the basis for an opera in 1947.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillau... -
André Breton
After World War I, French poet and literary theorist André Breton began to link at first with Dadaism but broke with that movement to write the first manifesto of surrealism in 1924.
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People best know this theorist as the principal founder. His writings include the Surrealist Manifesto (Manifeste du surréalisme), in which he defined this "pure psychic automatism."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3... -
Jean Giono
Jean Giono, the only son of a cobbler and a laundress, was one of France’s greatest writers. His prodigious literary output included stories, essays, poetry, plays, film scripts, translations and over thirty novels, many of which have been translated into English.
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Giono was a pacifist, and was twice imprisoned in France at the outset and conclusion of World War II.
He remained tied to Provence and Manosque, the little city where he was born in 1895 and, in 1970, died.
Giono was awarded the Prix Bretano, the Prix de Monaco (for the most outstanding
collected work by a French writer), the Légion d’Honneur, and he was
a member of the Académie Goncourt. -
Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Annie Allen and one of the most celebrated Black poets. She also served as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress—the first Black woman to hold that position. She was the poet laureate for the state of Illinois for over thirty years, a National Women’s Hall of Fame inductee, and the recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her works include We Are Shining, Bronzeville Boys and Girls, A Street in Bronzeville, In the Mecca, The Bean Eaters, and Maud Martha.
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Tzvetan Todorov
In Bulgarian Цветан Тодоров. Todorov was a Franco-Bulgarian historian, philosopher and literary theoretician. Among his most influential works is his theory on the fantastic, the uncanny and marvellous.
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René Descartes
Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) and Principles of Philosophy (1644), main works of French mathematician and scientist René Descartes, considered the father of analytic geometry and the founder of modern rationalism, include the famous dictum "I think, therefore I am."
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A set of two perpendicular lines in a plane or three in space intersect at an origin in Cartesian coordinate system. Cartesian coordinate, a member of the set of numbers, distances, locates a point in this system. Cartesian coordinates describe all points of a Cartesian plane.
From given sets, {X} and {Y}, one can construct Cartesian product, a set of all pairs of elements (x, y), such that x belongs to {X} and y belongs to {Y}.
Cartesian philosophers include An -
Charles Perrault
Charles Perrault was a French author who laid foundations for a new literary genre, the fairy tale, and whose best known tales, offered as if they were pre-existing folk tales, include: Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Puss in Boots, Cinderella, Bluebeard, Hop o' My Thumb), Diamonds and Toads, Patient Griselda, The Ridiculous Wishes...
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Perrault's most famous stories are still in print today and have been made into operas, ballets (e.g., Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty), plays, musicals, and films, both live-action and animation.
The Brothers Grimm retold their own versions of some of Perrault's fairy tales. -
Romain Gary
Romain Gary was a Jewish-French novelist, film director, World War II aviator and diplomat. He also wrote under the pen name Émile Ajar .
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Born Roman Kacew (Yiddish: קצב, Russian: Кацев), Romain Gary grew up in Vilnius to a family of Lithuanian Jews. He changed his name to Romain Gary when he escaped occupied France to fight with Great Britain against Germany in WWII. His father, Arieh-Leib Kacew, abandoned his family in 1925 and remarried. From this time Gary was raised by his mother, Nina Owczinski. When he was fourteen, he and his mother moved to Nice, France. In his books and interviews, he presented many different versions of his father's origin, parents, occupation and childhood.
He later studied law, first in Aix-en-Provence and then -
Tzvetan Todorov
In Bulgarian Цветан Тодоров. Todorov was a Franco-Bulgarian historian, philosopher and literary theoretician. Among his most influential works is his theory on the fantastic, the uncanny and marvellous.
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Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Annie Allen and one of the most celebrated Black poets. She also served as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress—the first Black woman to hold that position. She was the poet laureate for the state of Illinois for over thirty years, a National Women’s Hall of Fame inductee, and the recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her works include We Are Shining, Bronzeville Boys and Girls, A Street in Bronzeville, In the Mecca, The Bean Eaters, and Maud Martha.
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Jacques Cazotte
Born at Dijon, he was educated by the Jesuits, and at the age of 27 he obtained a public office at Martinique. It was not till his return to Paris in 1760 with the rank of commissioner-general that he made his public debut as an author. His first attempts, a mock romance and a coarse song, gained so much popularity, both in the Court and among the people, that he was encouraged to try something more ambitious. He accordingly produced his romance, Les Prouesses inimitables d'Ollivier, marquis d'Edesse.
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He also wrote a number of fantastic oriental tales, such as his Mille et une fadaises, Contes a dormir debout (1742). His first success was with a "poem" in twelve cantos, and in prose intermixed with verse, entitled Ollivier (2 vols, 1762), fo -
Nathalie Sarraute
Nathalie Sarraute (July 18, 1900 in Ivanovo, Russia – October 19, 1999 in Paris, France) was a lawyer and a French writer of Russian-Jewish origin.
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Sarraute was born Natalia/Natacha Tcherniak in Ivanovo (then known as Ivanovo-Voznesensk), 300 km north-east of Moscow in 1900 (although she frequently referred to the year of her birth as 1902, a date still cited in select reference works), and, following the divorce of her parents, spent her childhood shuttled between France and Russia. In 1909 she moved to Paris with her father. Sarraute studied law and literature at the prestigious Sorbonne, having a particular fondness for 20th century literature and the works of Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf, who greatly affected her conception of the no -
Jean Cocteau
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau (5 July 1889 – 11 October 1963) was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager, playwright and filmmaker. Along with other Surrealists of his generation (Jean Anouilh and René Char for example) Cocteau grappled with the "algebra" of verbal codes old and new, mise en scène language and technologies of modernism to create a paradox: a classical avant-garde. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Colette, Édith Piaf, whom he cast in one of his one act plays entitled Le Bel Indifferent in 1940, and Raymond Radiguet.
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His work was played out in the theatrical world of the Grands Theatres, the Boulevards and beyond during the Parisian epoque he both l -
Martha C. Nussbaum
Martha C. Nussbaum is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, appointed in the Law School and the Philosophy Department. Among her many awards are the 2018 Berggruen Prize, the 2017 Don M. Randel Award for Humanistic Studies from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the 2016 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy.
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Mariana Alcoforado
Mariana Vaz Alcoforado (Santa Maria da Feira, Beja, 22 April 1640 - Beja, 28 July 1723), was a Portuguese nun, living in the convent of the Poor Ladies (Convento de Nossa Senhora da Conceição) in Beja, Portugal.
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Debate continues as to whether Mariana was the real Portuguese author of the Letters of a Portuguese Nun (comprising five letters). Her purported love affair with the French officer Noël Bouton, Marquis de Chamilly and later Marshall of France, has made Beja famous in (mainly Portuguese and French) literary circles.
Some literary scholars consider the letters a fictional work and their authorship is ascribed to Gabriel-Joseph de La Vergne, comte de Guilleragues (1628–1685), although a real nun named Mariana Alcoforado did exist. In he -
Gaston Bachelard
Gaston Bachelard was a French philosopher who rose to some of the most prestigious positions in the French academy. His most important work is on poetics and on the philosophy of science. To the latter he introduced the concepts of epistemological obstacle and epistemological break (obstacle épistémologique et rupture épistémologique). He influenced many subsequent French philosophers, among them Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser.
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Pierre de Marivaux
Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, commonly referred to as Marivaux, was a French novelist and dramatist.
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He is considered one of the most important French playwrights of the 18th century, writing numerous comedies for the Comédie-Française and the Comédie-Italienne of Paris. His most important works are Le Triomphe de l'amour, Le Jeu de l'amour et du hasard and Les Fausses Confidences. He also published a number of essays and two important but unfinished novels, La Vie de Marianne and Le Paysan parvenu. -
Plato
Plato (Greek: Πλάτων), born Aristocles (c. 427 – 348 BC), was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical period who is considered a foundational thinker in Western philosophy and an innovator of the written dialogue and dialectic forms. He raised problems for what became all the major areas of both theoretical philosophy and practical philosophy, and was the founder of the Platonic Academy, a philosophical school in Athens where Plato taught the doctrines that would later become known as Platonism.
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Plato's most famous contribution is the theory of forms (or ideas), which has been interpreted as advancing a solution to what is now known as the problem of universals. He was decisively influenced by the pre-Socratic thinkers Pythagoras, H -
Honoré de Balzac
French writer Honoré de Balzac (born Honoré Balzac), a founder of the realist school of fiction, portrayed the panorama of society in a body of works, known collectively as La comédie humaine .
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Honoré de Balzac authored 19th-century novels and plays. After the fall of Napoléon in 1815, his magnum opus, a sequence of almost a hundred novels and plays, entitled, presents life in the years.
Due to keen observation of fine detail and unfiltered representation, European literature regards Balzac. He features renowned multifaceted, even complex, morally ambiguous, full lesser characters. Character well imbues inanimate objects; the city of Paris, a backdrop, takes on many qualities. He influenced many famous authors, including the novelists Mar -
Jules Michelet
His father was a master printer, not very prosperous, and Jules assisted him in the actual work of the press. A place was offered him in the imperial printing office, but his father was able to send him to the famous Collège or Lycée Charlemagne, where he distinguished himself. He passed the university examination in 1821, and was soon appointed to a professorship of history in the Collège Rollin.
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Soon after this, in 1824, he married. This was one of the most favourable periods ever for scholars and men of letters in France, and Michelet had powerful patrons in Abel-François Villemain and Victor Cousin, among others. Although he was an ardent politician (having from his childhood embraced republicanism and a peculiar variety of romantic free -
Albert Cohen
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Born Abraham Albert Cohen in Corfu, Greece, in 1895, as part of an important Sephardic Jewish community on the island. Albert’s parents, who owned a soap factory, moved to Marseille, France when he was a child. Albert Cohen discusses this period in his novel Le livre de ma mère (The Book of my Mother). He studied at a private Catholic school. In 1904, he started high school at Lycée Thiers, and graduated in 1913.
In 1914, he left Marseille for Geneva, Switzerland and enrolled in Law school. He graduated from Law School in 1917 and enrolled in Literature School in 1917 until 1919. In 1919, He became a Swiss citizen. That same year he married Elisabeth Broch -
Flora Tristan
Flore Celestine Thérèse Henriette Tristán y Moscoso better known as Flora Tristan was a French-Peruvian socialist writer and activist. She made important contributions to early feminist theory, and argued that the progress of women's rights was directly related with the progress of the working class. Her theories had a trong influence on Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Charles Fourier. She wrote several works, the best known of which are Peregrinations of a Pariah (1838), Promenades in London (1840), and The Workers' Union (1843).
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Tristan was also the grandmother of the painter Paul Gauguin. -
Julien Gracq
Julien Gracq (27 July 1910 – 22 December 2007), born Louis Poirier in St.-Florent-le-Vieil, in the French "département" of Maine-et-Loire, was a French writer. He wrote novels, criticism, a play, and poetry.
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Gracq first studied in Paris at the Lycée Henri IV, where he earned his baccalauréat. He then entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1930, later studying at the École libre des sciences politiques.
In 1932, he read André Breton's Nadja, which deeply influenced him. His first novel, The Castle of Argol is dedicated to that surrealist writer, to whom he devoted a whole book in 1948. -
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Alan F. Chalmers
Dr. Alan Chalmers was born in Bristol, UK in 1939. Despite beginning his academic career in Physics, Chalmers is best known for his work on the subject of the Philosophy of Science. He is most noted for his best-selling book "What Is This Thing Called Science?"
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Madame d'Aulnoy
Madame d'Aulnoy (Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d'Aulnoy) (1650/1651–4 January 1705) was a French writer known for her fairy tales. When she termed her works contes de fées (fairy tales, or literally, "Tales of the Fairies."), she originated the term that is now generally used for the genre. Her 'fairy tales' were written in a style suitable for entertaining in adult salon gatherings, and not with a child audience in mind.
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d'Aulnoy also wrote works of history (although not using modern attitudes to historical accuracy), pseudo-memoirs, and a few historical novels.
Born a member of the noble Le Jumel de Barneville family, she was known as the baronne d'Aulnoy by marriage. -
Cyrano de Bergerac
Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac, French satirist, and dramatist whose works combining political satire and science-fantasy inspired a number of later writers. He has been the basis of many romantic but unhistorical legends, of which the best known is Edmond Rostand’s play Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), in which he is portrayed as a gallant and brilliant but shy and ugly lover, possessed (as in fact he was) of a remarkably large nose.
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As a young man, Cyrano joined the company of guards and was wounded at the Siege of Arras in 1640. But he gave up his military career in the following year to study under the philosopher and mathematician Pierre Gassendi. Under the influence of Gassendi’s scientific theories and libertine philosophy, Cyrano wrote his tw -
Pierre Guyotat
Born in Bourg-Argental, Loire, Guyotat wrote his first novel, Sur un cheval, in 1960. He was called to Algeria in the same year. In 1962 he was found guilty of desertion and publishing forbidden material. After three months in jail he was transferred to a disciplinary centre. Back in Paris, he got involved in journalism, writing first for France Observateur, then for Nouvel Observateur. In 1964, Guyotat published his second novel Ashby.
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In 1967, he published Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats (later released in English as Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers). Based on Guyotat's ordeal as a soldier in the Algerian War, the book earned a cult reputation and became the subject of various controversies, mostly because of its omnipresent sexual obsession -
Ambai
Ambai (nom de plume of C. S. Lakshmi), is a historian, an independent Women's Studies researcher, and a feminist writer in Tamil. She obtained her Bachelor of Arts from Madras Christian College and MA in Bangalore and her PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her dissertation was on American policy towards refugees fleeing Hungary due to the failed revolution of 1956. After completing her education, she worked as a school teacher and college lecturer in Tamil Nadu. She is married to Vishnu Mathur, a film maker, and lives in Mumbai.
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In 1962, Ambai published her first work Nandimalai Charalilae (lit. At Nandi Hills) – written when she was still a teenager. Her first serious work of fiction was the Tamil novel Andhi Maalai (lit. Twil -
Philippe Jaccottet
Philippe Jaccottet was a Swiss Francophone poet and translator.
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Philippe Soupault
Philippe Soupault was a French writer and poet, novelist, critic, and political activist. He took an active role in the Dadaist movement and later founded the Surrealist movement with André Breton. Soupault founded the periodical Littérature together with the writers Breton and Louis Aragon in Paris 1919, which, for many, dates the beginnings of Surrealism. The first book of automatic writing, Les champs magnétiques (1920), was co-authored by Soupault and Breton. After imprisonment by the Nazis in World War II, Soupault traveled to the United States but subsequently returned to France. His works include such fat volumes of poetry as Aquarium (1917) and Rose des vents [compass card] (1920) and the novel Les Dernières Nuits de Paris (1928; tr
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Louis Guilloux
Louis Guilloux was a French known for his Social Realist novels describing working class life and political struggles in the mid-twentieth century. His best-known book is Le Sang noir (Black Blood), which has been described as a "prefiguration of Sartre's La Nausée."
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Before becoming a professional writer, literary translator and interpreter, Guilloux worked in various trades, including journalism. He was well known for his fluency in the English language. He married in 1924, and published La Maison du Peuple in 1927.
The success of the book led to a long series of novels on socially committed themes, usually based in his native Brittany. His masterpiece Le Sang Noir was notable for its departure from his earlier, more staightforwardly social -
Robert Desnos
Robert Desnos (4 July 1900 – 8 June 1945) was a French surrealist poet who played a key role in the Surrealist movement of his day.
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Elsa Triolet
Elsa Yur'evna Triolet (September 24 1896 - June 16, 1970) was a French writer.
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Born Ella Kagan (Russian: Элла Каган) into a Jewish family of a lawyer and a music teacher in Moscow, she and her sister, Lilya Brik received excellent educations; they were able to speak fluent German and French and play the piano. Elsa graduated from the Moscow Institute of Architecture.
Elsa enjoyed poetry and in 1915 befriended the aspiring futurist poet and graphic artist Vladimir Mayakovsky. When she invited him home, the poet fell madly in love with her older sister Lilya, who was married to Osip Brik. Elsa was the first to translate Mayakovsky's poetry (as well as volumes of other Russian-language poetry) to French.
In 1918, at the outset of Russian Civil Wa -
Daniel Arasse
L'historien de l’art français, spécialiste de la Renaissance et de l'art italien.
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Mahmoud Darwich
Mahmoud Darwich (en arabe : محمود درويش), né le 13 mars 1941 à Al-Birwah en Galilée (Palestine sous mandat britannique) et mort le 9 août 2008 à Houston (Texas, États-Unis), est une des figures de proue de la poésie palestinienne.
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Profondément engagé dans la lutte de son peuple, il n'a pour autant jamais cessé d'espérer la paix et sa renommée dépasse largement les frontières de son pays. Il est le président de l'Union des écrivains palestiniens. Il a publié plus de vingt volumes de poésie, sept livres en prose et a été rédacteur de plusieurs publications, comme Al-jadid - (الجديد - Le nouveau), Al-fajr (الفجر - L'aube), Shu'un filistiniyya (شؤون فلسطينية - Affaires palestiniennes) et Al-Karmel (الكرمل) . Il est reconnu internationalement pou -
Pierre Drieu la Rochelle
Pierre Eugène Drieu La Rochelle (3 January 1893 in Paris – 15 March 1945 in Paris) was a French writer of novels, short stories and political essays, who lived and died in Paris. He became a proponent of French fascism in the 1930s, and was a well-known collaborationist during the German occupation.
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Drieu was born into a middle class, petit bourgeois family from Normandy, based in the 17th arrondissement of Paris. His father was a failed businessman and womanizer who married his mother for her dowry. Although a brilliant student, Pierre failed his final exam at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques. Wounded three times, his experience as a soldier during World War I had a deep influence on him and marked him for the rest of his life.
In 191 -
René Char
René Char spent his childhood in Névons, the substantial family home completed at his birth, then studied as a boarder at the school of Avignon and subsequently, in 1925, a student at L'École de Commerce de Marseille, where he read Plutarch, François Villon, Racine, the German Romantics, Alfred de Vigny, Gérard de Nerval and Charles Baudelaire.
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His first book, Cloches sur le cœur was published in 1928 as a compilation of poems written between 1922 and 1926. In late November 1929, Char moved to Paris, where he met Louis Aragon, André Breton, and René Crevel, and joined the surrealists. He remained active in the surrealist movement through the early 1930s but distanced himself gradually from the mid-1930s onward. Throughout his career, Char's -
Charles Cros
Charles Cros or Émile-Hortensius-Charles Cros (October 1, 1842 – August 9, 1888) was a French poet and inventor. He was born in Fabrezan, Aude, France, 35 km to the East of Carcassonne.
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Cros was a well-regarded poet and humorous writer. As an inventor, he was interested in the fields of transmitting graphics by telegraph and making photographs in color, but he is perhaps best known for being the first person to conceive a method for reproducing recorded sound, an invention he named the Paleophone.
Charles Cros died in Paris at the age of 45. -
Henri Michaux
Henri Michaux was a highly idiosyncratic Belgian poet, writer and painter who wrote in the French language. Michaux is best known for his esoteric books written in a highly accessible style, and his body of work includes poetry, travelogues, and art criticism. Michaux travelled widely, tried his hand at several careers, and experimented with drugs, the latter resulting in two of his most intriguing works, Miserable Miracle and The Major Ordeals of the Mind and the Countless Minor Ones.
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Clément Marot
Clément Marot (23 November 1496 – 12 September 1544) was a French Renaissance poet.
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Clément Marot (vers 1496-septembre 1544) est un poète français de la Renaissance. -