A short life of the author
Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961) was born Louis-Ferdinand Auguste Destouches on 27 May 1894 in Courbevoie, France. He served in World War I and was severely wounded. He became a doctor and practiced medicine in poor communities for most of his life.
Life and Career
Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night, 1932) — a picaresque novel following Ferdinand Bardamu from the trenches of World War I to colonial Africa to the Ford factories of Detroit to the slums of Paris — is one of the great novels of the twentieth century. Its spoken-language prose, torrential rhythm, and savage humor broke with the French literary tradition and influenced writers from Henry Miller to Charles Bukowski to Thomas Bernhard.
Mort à crédit (Death on the Installment Plan, 1936) — about Ferdinand’s childhood and adolescence in Paris — is equally extraordinary: funnier, more chaotic, and more inventive.
In the late 1930s, Céline published a series of virulently anti-Semitic pamphlets — Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937), L’École des cadavres (1938), and Les Beaux Draps (1941) — that remain among the most repellent documents in French literature. After the Liberation, he fled to Germany and then Denmark, where he was imprisoned. He was convicted of collaboration in absentia, then amnestied in 1951. His late trilogy — D’un château l’autre (Castle to Castle, 1957), Nord (North, 1960), and Rigodon (1969, posthumous) — recounts his wartime flight.
Major Works and Themes
Céline wrote about suffering, poverty, war, and the human capacity for cruelty. His greatness as a stylist is inseparable from his moral monstrousness — a problem that literary culture has never resolved and cannot.
Key Works
- Journey to the End of the Night (1932)
- Death on the Installment Plan (1936)
Collecting Céline
French originals (Denoël et Steele, Gallimard) are the primary collected form. Voyage first edition brings $1,000–$3,000. English translations (New Directions) bring $30–$80. The anti-Semitic pamphlets are not commercially published and are not collected items. Céline died in 1961.