Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Céline, born Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, was severely wounded and decorated in the First World War, an experience that left him with a lifelong disgust for patriotic rhetoric. He trained as a doctor and spent years treating the poor in a Paris suburb clinic, writing Journey to the End of the Night in his spare time: an instant sensation that narrated the war, colonial Africa, and industrial Detroit through the same corrosive, slangy voice.

In the late 1930s he published vicious antisemitic pamphlets that made him a Nazi collaborator's fellow traveler; he fled France at the Liberation, was tried in absentia, and spent years in exile in Denmark before an amnesty let him return in 1951. He resumed practicing medicine and writing (Castle to Castle among his late novels) in a Paris suburb until his death in 1961, his literary stature permanently shadowed by his politics.