Emmanuel Roblès (4 May 1914 in Oran, French Algeria – 22 February 1995 in Boulogne, Hauts-de-Seine) was a French author and playwright. He was elected a member of the Académie Goncourt in 1973. He was one of many influential "pied-noir" of his time. The literary award Prix Emmanuel Roblès has been established in his honour in 1990.
André Maurois (French: [mɔʁwa]; born Émile Salomon Wilhelm Herzog; 26 July 1885 – 9 October 1967) was a French author.
Roger Martin du Gard (French: [dy gaʁ]; 23 March 1881 – 22 August 1958) was a French novelist, winner of the 1937 Nobel Prize in Literature.
René Crevel (French: [kʁəvɛl]; 10 August 1900 – 18 June 1935) was a French writer involved with the surrealist movement.
Marcel Aymé (29 March 1902 – 14 October 1967) was a French novelist and playwright, who also wrote screenplays and works for children.
Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint-Exupéry, known simply as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (UK: , US: , French: [ɑ̃twan də sɛ̃t‿ɛɡzypeʁi]; 29 June 1900 – 31 July 1944), was a French writer, poet, journalist and pioneering aviator. He received several prestigious literary awards for his novella The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince) and for his lyrical aviation writings, including Wind, Sand and Stars and Night Flight (Vol de nuit). They were translated into many languages.
Saint-Exupéry was a successful commercial pilot before World War II, working airmail routes in Europe, Africa, and South America. He joined the French Air Force at the start of the war, flying reconnaissance missions until France's armistice with Germany in 1940. After being demobilised by the French Air Force, he travelled to the United States to help persuade its government to enter the war against Nazi Germany.
Saint-Exupéry spent 28 months in the United States of America, during which he wrote three of his most important works, then joined the Free French Air Force in North Africa, even though he was far past the maximum age for such pilots and in declining health. He disappeared and is believed to have died while on a reconnaissance mission from the French island of Corsica over the Mediterranean on 31 July 1944. Although the wreckage of his plane was discovered off the coast of Marseille in 2000, the ultimate cause of the crash remains unknown.
Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (27 May 1894 – 1 July 1961), better known by the pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline ( say-LEEN, French: [lwi fɛʁdinɑ̃ selin] ), 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. In subsequent novels such as Death on the Installment Plan (1936), Guignol's Band (1944) and Castle to Castle (1957) Céline further developed an innovative and distinctive literary style. Maurice Nadeau wrote: "What Joyce did for the English language...what the surrealists attempted to do for the French language, Céline achieved effortlessly and on a vast scale."From 1937 Céline wrote a series of antisemitic polemical works in which he advocated a military alliance with Nazi Germany. He continued to publicly espouse antisemitic views during the German occupation of France, and after the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944, he fled to Germany and then Denmark where he lived in exile. He was convicted of collaboration by a French court in 1951 but was pardoned by a military tribunal soon after. He returned to France where he resumed his careers as a doctor and author. Céline is widely considered to be one of the greatest French novelists of the 20th century but remains a controversial figure in France due to his antisemitism and activities during the Second World War.
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (French: [sidɔni ɡabʁijɛl kɔlɛt]; 28 January 1873 – 3 August 1954), known as Colette, was a French author and woman of letters. She was also a mime, actress, and journalist. Colette is best known in the English-speaking world for her 1944 novella Gigi, which was the basis for the 1958 film and the 1973 stage production of the same name. Her short story collection The Tendrils of the Vine is also famous in France.
Auguste-Maurice Barrès (French: [baʁɛs]; 19 August 1862 – 4 December 1923) was a French novelist, journalist, philosopher, and politician. Spending some time in Italy, he became a figure in French literature with the release of his work The Cult of the Self in 1888. In politics, he was first elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1889 as a Boulangist and would play a prominent political role for the rest of his life.
Joseph Malègue (8 December 1876 – 30 December 1940), was a French catholic novelist, principally author of Augustin ou le Maître est là (1933) and Pierres noires. Les classes moyennes du Salut. He was also a theologian and published some theological surveys, as Pénombres about Faith and against Fideism. His first novel is, following the French historian of spirituality Émile Goichot, the most accurately linked to Modernism. Pope Francis quoted in several circumstances, among them in El Jesuita this Malègue's view about Incarnation : ‘’ It is not Christ who is incomprehensible for me if He is God, it is God who is strange for me if He is not Christ.‘’