Anatole France

Born Jacques Anatole Thibault, the son of a Parisian bookseller who specialized in materials on the French Revolution, France grew into the era's foremost man of letters, elected to the Académie française in 1896 and awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1921 for a body of work prized for its irony and classical polish.

He was also politically engaged in ways his elegant style disguised: a vocal defender of Alfred Dreyfus during the Dreyfus Affair, and, in later years, an increasingly outspoken sympathizer with socialism and the Bolshevik cause. Penguin Island (1908), which retells all of French history with baptized penguins standing in for the nation, aimed its satire squarely at the church, the army, and nationalist myth-making.

When he died in 1924, a new generation of Surrealists publicly denounced him at his own funeral procession as everything modern literature should reject.