Henri Barbusse

Barbusse started in the 1890s as a Symbolist poet and slid into neo-Naturalist fiction, respectable but unremarkable. Then 1914: the pacifist volunteered for service, earned the Croix de guerre, and came back with Under Fire in 1916 - a novel drawn from the trenches that became the seed text of the Lost Generation, the book that showed a generation of writers what the war actually looked like on the page. The experience radicalized him. He decided revolution against the imperialist governments was the only way to kill militarism for good, joined the French Communist Party, and spent the next two decades mixing war memory with political polemic. In the 1930s he wrote a biography of Stalin - friendly with Trotsky in the '20s, but willing to feed the cult by decade's end - that became gospel for French Stalinists, though it never quite matched Moscow's own fever pitch. He died in August 1935, five months before the show trials began.