Léon Bloy (French pronunciation: [leɔ̃ blwa]; 11 July 1846 – 3 November 1917) was a French Catholic novelist, essayist, pamphleteer (or lampoonist), and satirist, known additionally for his eventual (and passionate) defense of Catholicism and for his influence within French Catholic circles.
Archibald Joseph Cronin (19 July 1896 – 6 January 1981), known as A. J. Cronin, was a Scottish physician and novelist. His best-known novel is The Citadel (1937), about a Scottish doctor who serves in a Welsh mining village before achieving success in London, where he becomes disillusioned about the venality and incompetence of some doctors. Cronin knew both areas, as a medical inspector of mines and as a doctor in Harley Street. The book exposed unfairness and malpractice in British medicine and helped to inspire the National Health Service. The Stars Look Down, set in the North East of England, is another of his best-selling novels inspired by his work among miners. Both novels have been filmed, as have Hatter's Castle, The Keys of the Kingdom and The Green Years. His 1935 novella Country Doctor inspired a long-running BBC radio and TV series, Dr. Finlay's Casebook (1962–1971), set in the 1920s. There was a follow-up series in 1993–1996.
Ernst Jünger (German pronunciation: [ɛʁnst ˈjʏŋɐ]; 29 March 1895 – 17 February 1998) was a German author, highly decorated soldier, philosopher, and entomologist who became publicly known for his World War I memoir Storm of Steel.
The son of a successful businessman and chemist, Jünger rebelled against an affluent upbringing and sought adventure in the Wandervogel German youth movement, before running away to briefly serve in the French Foreign Legion, which was an illegal act in Germany. However, he escaped prosecution due to his father's efforts and was able to enlist in the German Army on the outbreak of World War I in 1914. During an ill-fated offensive in 1918 Jünger was badly wounded and was awarded the Pour le Mérite, a rare decoration for one of his rank.
He wrote against liberal values, democracy, and the Weimar Republic, but rejected the advances of the Nazis who were rising to power. During World War II Jünger served as an army captain in occupied Paris, but by 1943 he had turned decisively against Nazi totalitarianism, a change manifested in his work "Der Friede" (The Peace). Jünger was dismissed from the army in 1944 after he was indirectly implicated with fellow officers who had plotted to kill Hitler. A few months later, his son died in combat in Italy after having been sentenced to a penal battalion for political reasons.After the war, Jünger was treated with some suspicion as a possible fellow traveller of the Nazis. By the later stages of the Cold War, his unorthodox writings about the impact of materialism in modern society were widely seen as conservative rather than radical nationalist, and his philosophical works came to be highly regarded in mainstream German circles. Jünger ended life as an honoured literary figure, although critics continued to charge him with the glorification of war as a transcendental experience in some of his early works. He was an ardent militarist and one of the most complex and contradictory figures in 20th-century German literature.
Reinhard Johannes Sorge (29 January 1892 – 20 July 1916) was a German dramatist and poet. He is best known for writing the Expressionist play The Beggar (Der Bettler), which won the Kleist Prize in 1912 and almost singlehandedly created surrealist theatre and modern theatrical stagecraft. After being subsequently received into the Roman Catholic Church, Sorge began an effort to bring the Catholic literary revival into the literature of the Germanosphere. Instead, Sorge was conscripted into the Imperial German Army in World War I in 1915. He was killed in action during the Battle of the Somme in the summer of 1916. Sorge's Der Bettler, however, received a posthumous premiere in a groundbreaking production by legendary Austrian Jewish stage director Max Reinhardt in 1917.
Clemente Rebora (6 January 1885 – 1 November 1957) was a poet from Milan, Italy. He received a degree in Italian literature in Milan. In the early 1900s he worked for the magazines La Voce, Rivista d’Italia and La Riviera Ligure.His book Frammenti Lirici (Italian: Lyrical Fragments) was published in 1913. From 1913 to 1922, he wrote anonymous "Songs" and lyrics. After World War I Rebora began to work as a teacher.Previously an atheist, he had a spiritual crisis in 1928 and became a devout Catholic. In 1930, he entered a seminary; in 1936, he became a Rosminian priest. After this, his work became religious in orientation, but his work is popular beyond Catholic circles for its treatment of metaphysics and physics. He is somewhat controversial for his friendship with Julius Evola, but the friendship seems to have been largely based on his hope Julius would convert to Christianity. When this hope grew dim the friendship declined.
Ferdinand Vincent-de-Paul Marie Brunetière (19 July 1849 – 9 December 1906) was a French writer and critic.
André Frossard (14 January 1915 – 2 February 1995) was a French journalist and essayist.
Gerard Kornelis van het Reve (14 December 1923 – 8 April 2006) was a Dutch writer. He started writing as Simon Gerard van het Reve and adopted the shorter Gerard Reve [ˈɣeːrɑrt ˈreːvə] in 1973. Together with Willem Frederik Hermans and Harry Mulisch, he is considered one of the "Great Three" (De Grote Drie) of Dutch post-war literature. His 1981 novel De vierde man (The Fourth Man) was the basis for Paul Verhoeven's 1983 film.
Reve was one of the first homosexual authors to come out in the Netherlands. He often wrote explicitly about erotic attraction, sexual relations and intercourse between men, which many readers considered shocking. However, he did this in an ironic, humorous and recognizable way, which contributed to making homosexuality acceptable for many of his readers. Another main theme, often in combination with eroticism, was religion. Reve himself declared that the primary message in all of his work was salvation from the material world we live in.
Gerard Reve was born in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and was the brother of the Slavicist and essayist Karel van het Reve, who became a staunch anti-communist in his own way; the personal rapport between the brothers was not good. They broke off relations altogether in the 1980s.
Charles Pierre Péguy (French: [ʃaʁl peɡi]; 7 January 1873 – 5 September 1914) was a French poet, essayist, and editor. His two main philosophies were socialism and nationalism; by 1908 at the latest, after years of uneasy agnosticism, he had become a believing (but generally non-practicing) Roman Catholic.
From that time, Catholicism strongly influenced his works.