Boris Vian

Vian trained as an engineer but spent his short life restlessly elsewhere: playing trumpet in Saint-Germain-des-Prés jazz clubs, translating and championing American jazz and crime fiction in postwar Paris, and writing songs, plays, and novels at a dizzying rate, all while managing a heart condition from childhood rheumatic fever that doctors told him would kill him young.

Under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan he wrote pulp thrillers parodying American hardboiled fiction, one of which, I Spit on Your Graves, became a scandal and a bestseller once his authorship leaked. Froth on the Daydream, his own name's finest novel, folded surrealist whimsy (a lily growing in a woman's lung) into heartbreak as its young couple's world dissolves. He died of heart failure in 1959, at thirty-nine, during a private screening of the film adaptation of the Sullivan novel.