Jean-Louis Curtis
Jean-Louis Curtis (May 22, 1917 - Nov. 11, 1995),[1] pseudonym of Louis Laffitte, was a French novelist best known for his second novel The Forests of the Night (French: Les Forêts de la nuit),[1] which won France's highest literary award the Prix Goncourt in 1947. He has authored over 30 novels.[2]
Curtis was born in Orthez, Pyrénées-Atlantiques.[2] He was one of the founders of the literary monthly La Table Ronde in 1948. He was elected to the French Academy in 1986.[2]
Martin Seymour-Smith said of Curtis in the early 1980s:
- He is one of the best of the 'conventional' novelists now writing in France, but is very uneven: he is not worried about originality of technique, and prefers to concentrate on what he can do well, which is to anatomize bourgeois societies and 'artistic' communities.[3]
Select works
- Les Jeunes hommes (1946) - first novel.
- Les Forets de la nuit (1947; The Forests of the Night) - "acid portraits of those who played at being members of the Resistance"[4] Winner of the Prix Goncourt 1947.
- Gibier de Potence (1949; Lucifer's Dream) -"an acid picture of postwar Paris".[3]
- Chers corbeaux (1951) - "targets the Parisian bourgeoisie who had done well out of the Nazi occupation"[4]
- Les Justes Causes (1954; The Side of the Angels) about the liberation of Paris.
- La Parade (1960) "a devastating satire on rich old provincial upper-class drones".[4]
- Le Jeune couple (1967) "dealt with the splendours<sic> and miseries of .. 'consumer society'".[4]
- Le Mauvais choix (1984) "attacked Christian bigotry. It is his only historical novel, set in the third century AD."[4]
Notes
External links
| Persondata |
| Name |
Curtis, Jean-Louis |
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| Short description |
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| Date of birth |
May 22, 1917 |
| Place of birth |
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| Date of death |
1995 |
| Place of death |
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