French Novelists, 1930-1960

This is the second of three DLB volumes to cover French literature of the 20th century. It offers a chronological grouping of novelists whose careers often spanned more than one period but whose literary concerns are associated mainly with the decade prior to World War II, the war and Occupation years, the apres-guerre and the 1950s. In the darkening years prior to 1939, radical social changes in France were both inevitable and desirable. Having made social criticism central in their...
More Description

This is the second of three DLB volumes to cover French literature of the 20th century. It offers a chronological grouping of novelists whose careers often spanned more than one period but whose literary concerns are associated mainly with the decade prior to World War II, the war and Occupation years, the apres-guerre and the 1950s. In the darkening years prior to 1939, radical social changes in France were both inevitable and desirable. Having made social criticism central in their fiction, the writers of this period were generally alike in their nihilistic viewpoints. Many French novelists were shaped in the postwar years by their desire to make their writing serve as a foundation for the radical changes they sensed should take place and to underscore weaknesses and needs of contemporary France. This period has been accurately called the generation of committed literature in French existentialism.27 entries include: Louis Aragon, Marcel Arland, Simone de Beauvoir, Georges Bernanos, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Andre Malraux, Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Elsa Triolet, Marguerite Yourcenar and Antoine de Saint-Exupery.