French · 1920–1959
French polymath—novelist, playwright, jazz trumpeter, songwriter, translator, engineer—who crammed several lifetimes into thirty-nine years. Born in a wealthy Paris suburb, Vian studied engineering while playing jazz in Saint-Germain-des-Prés clubs. He wrote L'Écume des jours (Froth on the Daydream) in three weeks, a surrealist love story where pianos mix cocktails and a water lily grows in a woman's lung. Under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan, he wrote a fake American noir that caused a censorship scandal. Heart disease killed him during the screening of a film adaptation he hated. His inventiveness—puns, neologisms, absurdist logic—influenced generations of French writers.