Roland Topor (7 January 1938 – 16 April 1997) was a French illustrator, cartoonist, comics artist, painter, novelist, playwright, film and TV writer, filmmaker and actor, who was known for the surreal nature of his work. He was of Polish-Jewish origin. His parents were Jewish émigrés from Warsaw, Poland. He spent the early years of his life in Savoy, where his family hid him from the Gestapo.
Boileau-Narcejac is the pen name used by the French crime-writing duo of Pierre Boileau (28 April 1906 – 16 January 1989) and Pierre Ayraud, also known as Thomas Narcejac (3 July 1908 – 7 June 1998). Their successful collaboration produced 43 novels, 100 short stories and 4 plays. They are credited with having helped to form an authentically French subgenre of crime fiction with the emphasis on local settings and mounting psychological suspense. They are noted for the ingenuity of their plots and the skillful evocation of the mood of disorientation and fear. Their works were adapted into numerous films, most notably, Les Diaboliques (1955), directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, and Vertigo (1958), directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
Boileau-Narcejac is the pen name used by the French crime-writing duo of Pierre Boileau (28 April 1906 – 16 January 1989) and Pierre Ayraud, also known as Thomas Narcejac (3 July 1908 – 7 June 1998). Their successful collaboration produced 43 novels, 100 short stories and 4 plays. They are credited with having helped to form an authentically French subgenre of crime fiction with the emphasis on local settings and mounting psychological suspense. They are noted for the ingenuity of their plots and the skillful evocation of the mood of disorientation and fear. Their works were adapted into numerous films, most notably, Les Diaboliques (1955), directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, and Vertigo (1958), directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
Léo Malet (7 March 1909 – 3 March 1996) was a French crime novelist and surrealist.
René Daumal (French: [domal]; 16 March 1908 – 21 May 1944) was a French spiritual para-surrealist writer, critic and poet, best known for his posthumously published novel Mount Analogue (1952) as well as for being an early, outspoken practitioner of pataphysics.
Pierre Jean Jouve (11 October 1887 – 8 January 1976) was a French writer, novelist and poet. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times. In 1966 he was awarded the Grand Prix de Poésie by the French Academy.Born and raised in Arras, as a teenager Jouve read Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Baudelaire and began to write poetry of his own. In 1906, he and his sister Madeleine, together with their close family friends the Charpentiers, founded the literary magazine Le Bandeau d'Or. At that time, Jouve drew close to the Abbaye de Créteil, a literary and utopian movement based outside Paris. In 1910 he married Andrée Charpentier, and the couple moved to Poitiers, where Andrée took a position as a teacher and Pierre sold player pianos. During World War One he served as an orderly in the hospital at Poitiers. A militant pacifist, in 1915 he and Andrée left France for Switzerland, where he became close to the novelist Romain Rolland and continued to serve as an orderly.In the 1920s, Jouve fell in love with Blanche Reverchon, a psychiatrist and the first translator of Sigmund Freud's work into French; later, at Freud's urging, she established her own practice as a psychoanalyst in Paris.. She and Jouve were married in 1925. In 1928, after undergoing analysis himself, Jouve renounced all of his previously published work. His subsequent writing was heavily influenced by his reading of Freud and deeply engaged with themes of sexuality and guilt. In later life, he and Blanche were at the center of a circle of writers and artists that included Balthus, Philippe Roman, David Gascoyne, and Henry Bauchaud. Vociferously anti-fascist, Jouve was along with Louis Aragon one of the chief poets of the French resistance.
Alfred Capus (25 November 1858 – 1 November 1922) was a French journalist and playwright, who was born in Aix-en-Provence and died in Neuilly-sur-Seine.
Alexandre Bisson (9 April 1848 – 27 January 1912) was a French playwright, vaudeville creator, and novelist. Born in Briouze, Orne in Lower Normandy, he was successful in his native France as well as in the United States. Remembered as a significant creator of Parisian vaudeville, in collaboration with Edmond Gondinet, Bisson's 1881 three-act comedy Un Voyage d'agrément was performed at the Théâtre du Vaudeville in Paris.Of his works, Bisson is best remembered for his play Madame X, which was performed in 1910 both in Paris and on Broadway with Sarah Bernhardt in the leading role. Over the years, the play would be revived for Broadway three times and nine Madame X motion pictures in several languages have been filmed. The first silent screen adaptation was in 1916 and the latest was in 2000. Better-known versions include a 1929 sound film starring Ruth Chatterton and directed by Lionel Barrymore plus the 1966 film starring Lana Turner. In 2006, a musical based on the original play was produced in Chicago.
Bisson also adapted the 1910 best-selling Florence Barclay novel, The Rosary as a three-act play for the Paris stage. Widely acclaimed in the United States, Bisson was invited to write about the theatre by The Saturday Evening Post and his articles "The Dilemmas of the Theater" and "How the World Contributes to the American Stage" were published in 1912.
Bisson died in Paris in 1912 at the age of 63.
Nicolas Camille Flammarion FRAS (French: [nikɔla kamij flamaʁjɔ̃]; 26 February 1842 – 3 June 1925) was a French astronomer and author. He was a prolific author of more than fifty titles, including popular science works about astronomy, several notable early science fiction novels, and works on psychical research and related topics. He also published the magazine L'Astronomie, starting in 1882. He maintained a private observatory at Juvisy-sur-Orge, France.
Catulle Mendès (22 May 1841 – 8 February 1909) was a French poet and man of letters.