Thu, Oct 26, 2000
Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (1894 - 1961) better known by the pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline. He was a French novelist, polemicist, and physician. His first novel "Journey to the End of the Night" (1932) won the Prix Renaudot but divided critics due to the author's pessimistic depiction of the human condition and his writing style based on working class speech. From 1937 Céline wrote a series of antisemitic polemical works in which he advocated a military alliance with Nazi Germany. After the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944 he fled to Germany and then Denmark where he lived in exile.
