French · 1894–1961
French novelist and physician whose first book detonated modern prose style. Born Louis-Ferdinand Destouches in a Paris suburb, he served in World War I, studied medicine, and worked in public health before publishing Journey to the End of the Night in 1932. That novel's hallucinatory monologue—sardonic, lyrical, relentlessly vulgar—changed what sentences could do. His later work grew darker, his politics turned monstrous (virulent antisemitic pamphlets in the late 1930s), and after collaborating with Vichy he fled to Denmark, then returned to France under amnesty. Writers from Henry Miller to Charles Bukowski to Philip Roth have acknowledged his technical influence. The voice remains inimitable: raging, musical, unforgivable.