Who Is Louis-Ferdinand Céline?

Louis-Ferdinand Céline is an author who was born in Paris in 1894 by the name of Louis-Ferdinand Destouches. Céline is the pen name that was used for his writing. He joined the French cavalry in 1912, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, during which he suffered a head injury on the front lines which would cause him both physical pain and mental anguish for the rest of his life.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline wrote two great novels: Journey to the End of the Night written in 1932 and Death on the Instalment Plan which was written in 1936. Journey to the End of the Night broke many conventions regarding the use of slang, and a book was later written about the controversy of it not winning the Prix Goncourt. Death on the Instalment Plan was an excellent portrayal of human suffering.

After the war Louis-Ferdinand Céline studied medicine and became a doctor, visiting an American car plant in Detroit as a member of a European medical delegation He later set up his practice in the impoverished outskirts of Paris. He was charged with being anti Semitic due to his political writings, though he defended these as merely attempts to warn people of the atrocities of war. He went to Denmark after the Nazis were driven out of France in 1944, was tried by the new government and sentenced to death in absentia though the sentence that was never carried out. He returned to France after a year's imprisonment and public disgrace, to rebuild his reputation and career with accounts of his exile.

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