20th-century French male writers

Jacques Vaché (7 September 1895 – 6 January 1919) was a friend of André Breton, the founder of surrealism. Vaché was one of the chief inspirations behind the Surrealist movement. As Breton said:

"En littérature, je me suis successivement épris de Rimbaud, de Jarry, d'Apollinaire, de Nouveau, de Lautréamont, mais c'est à Jacques Vaché que je dois le plus"("In literature, I was successively taken with Rimbaud, with Jarry, with Apollinaire, with Nouveau, with Lautréamont, but it is Jacques Vaché to whom I owe the most")He was born on 7 September 1895 in Lorient, France, and died in a hotel room in Nantes on 6 January 1919 from an overdose of opium. Alongside him lay the naked body of another French soldier. André Breton believed his death to be a suicide. He was known for his indifference and for wearing a monocle.

Jacques Lanzmann (4 May 1927 – 21 June 2006) was a French journalist, writer and lyricist. He is best known as a novelist and for his songwriting partnership with Jacques Dutronc.

Pêr-Jakez Helias, baptised Pierre-Jacques Hélias, nom de plume Pierre-Jakez Hélias (1914–1995) was a Breton stage actor, journalist, author, poet, and writer for radio who worked in the French and Breton languages. For many years he directed a weekly radio programme in the Breton language and co-founded a summer festival at Quimper which became the Festival de Cornouaille.

André Hardellet (13 February 1911 – 24 July 1974) was a French poet and writer. He was the 1974 winner of the Prix des Deux Magots.

Jean-Pierre Duprey (1 January 1930, in Rouen – 2 October 1959, in Paris) was a French poet and sculptor, one of the modern examples of a poète maudit (accursed poet).
Duprey said "I, I shouldn't have got stuck in this galaxy!" André Breton, fascinated by the darkness and imagery in Duprey's poetry, invited the author to Paris in 1948. Duprey's books are not a celebration of death, neither do they find comfort in thinking about it. All questions asked in the poems of his last book The End and the Means (1970) are left unanswered, but their author found a way somewhere "beyond" (Jouffroy, 1970, quoted in ).
He had a sense for scandals, too. One day he went to the grave of the Unknown Soldier by the Arc de Triomphe and urinated on the eternal flame for which he was arrested and beaten in the jail; later also taken to a mental hospital. Between 1951 and 1958 he did not write and concentrated on working on sculptures. He wrote his final book in 1959 and upon completion, he asked his wife to send the manuscript to Breton. When she returned from the post office, she found him dead; he had hanged himself in his studio.
Three days before his death, he said calmly to a friend: "I am allergic to this planet".

Louis-René des Forêts (January 28, 1918 – December 31, 2000) was a French writer.

Éric Chevillard (born 18 June 1964) is a French novelist. He has won awards for several novels including La nébuleuse du crabe in 1993, which won the Fénéon Prize for Literature.
Chevillard was born in La Roche-sur-Yon, Vendée. His work often plays with the codes of narration, sometimes to the degree that it is even difficult to understand which story is being told. His books have consequently been classified as postmodern literature. He has been noted for his associations with Les Éditions de Minuit, a publishing-house largely associated with the leading experimental writers composing in French today.

Gabriel Chevallier (3 May 1895 – 6 April 1969) was a French novelist widely known as the author of the satire Clochemerle. He is also known for Fear (La Peur), a novel about the World War I.

Gilbert Cesbron (13 January 1913, Paris – 12 August 1979, Paris) was a French novelist.

François Bon (born 22 May 1953 in Luçon) is a French writer and translator.