Louis-Ferdinand Céline
| Louis-Ferdinand Céline | |
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Louis-Ferdinand Céline on winning the Prix Renaudot for his novel Journey to the End of the Night in 1932
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| Born | Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches 27 May 1894 Courbevoie, France |
| Died | 1 July 1961 (aged 67) Meudon, France |
| Occupation | Novelist, pamphleteer, doctor |
| Nationality | French |
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Louis-Ferdinand Céline ([selin]) was the pen name of Dr. Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (pronounced: [detuʃ]; 27 May 1894 – 1 July 1961), a French novelist, pamphleteer and physician. He developed a new style of writing that modernized French literature. His most famous work is the 1932 novel, Journey to the End of the Night.
Céline used a working-class, spoken style of language in his writings, and attacked what he considered to be the overly polished, "bourgeois" language of the "academy". His works influenced a broad array of literary figures, not only in France but also in the English-speaking world and elsewhere in the Western World; this includes authors associated with modernism, existentialism, black comedy and the Beat Generation.
However, Céline's vocal support for the Axis powers during the Second World War and his authorship of some offensively anti-Semitic pamphlets, has meant that his legacy as a cultural icon is a tangled one.
The only child of Fernand Destouches and Marguerite-Louise-Céline Guilloux, he was born Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches in 1894 at Courbevoie, just outside Paris in the Seine département (now Hauts-de-Seine). The family came originally from Normandy on his father's side and Brittany on his mother's side. His father was a middle manager in an insurance company and his mother owned a boutique where she sold antique lace. In 1905 he was awarded his Certificat d'études, after which he worked as an apprentice and messenger boy in various trades. Between 1908 and 1910 his parents sent him to Germany and England for a year in each country in order to acquire foreign languages for future employment. From the time he left school until the age of eighteen Céline worked in various jobs, leaving or losing them after only short periods of time. He often found himself working for jewellers, first, at eleven, as an errand boy, and later as a salesperson for a local goldsmith. Although he was no longer being formally educated, he bought schoolbooks with the money he earned, and studied by himself. It was around this time that Céline started to want to become a doctor.
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