Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches, writing as Louis-Ferdinand Céline, published Journey to the End of the Night in 1932, a novel whose working-class rhythms and bleak view of humanity won the Prix Renaudot and split French letters down the middle. He pushed further in Death on the Installment Plan (1936), Guignol's Band (1944), and Castle to Castle (1957), building what Maurice Nadeau called the French equivalent of Joyce's reinvention of English. From 1937 he published antisemitic polemics calling for military alliance with Nazi Germany, continued espousing those views under occupation, and…