Jean-Louis Curtis pseudonym

Pseudonym

A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...

 of Louis Laffitte, was a French novelist best known for his second novel The Forests of the Night

The Forests of the Night

The Forests of the Night is the second novel by French author Jean-Louis Curtis. It is critically his best, and his best selling after it won the 1947 Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize. The novel is set in Curtis' native region of Pyrénées-Atlantiques...

(French: Les Forêts de la nuit), which won France's highest literary award the Prix Goncourt

Prix Goncourt

The Prix Goncourt is a prize in French literature, given by the académie Goncourt to the author of "the best and most imaginative prose work of the year"...

 in 1947. He has authored over 30 novels.

Curtis was born in Orthez

Orthez

Orthez is a commune in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques department in south-western France.It lies 40 km NW of Pau on the Southern railway to Bayonne. The town also encompasses the small village of Sainte-Suzanne thus residents of the town are called either Orthéziens or Sainte-Suzannais...

, Pyrénées-Atlantiques

Pyrénées-Atlantiques

Pyrénées-Atlantiques is a department in the southwest of France which takes its name from the Pyrenees mountains and the Atlantic Ocean.- History :...

. He was one of the founders of the literary monthly La Table Ronde in 1948. He was elected to the French Academy in 1986.

Martin Seymour-Smith

Martin Seymour-Smith

Martin Roger Seymour-Smith was a British poet, literary critic, biographer and astrologer.Seymour-Smith was born in London and educated at Oxford University where he was editor of Isis...

 said of Curtis in the early 1980s:

He is one of the best of the 'conventional' novelists now writing in France, but is very uneven: he is not worried about originality of technique, and prefers to concentrate on what he can do well, which is to anatomize bourgeois societies and 'artistic' communities.

Select works

• Les Jeunes hommes (1946) - first novel.
• Les Forets de la nuit (1947; The Forests of the Night
  The Forests of the Night
  The Forests of the Night is the second novel by French author Jean-Louis Curtis. It is critically his best, and his best selling after it won the 1947 Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize. The novel is set in Curtis' native region of Pyrénées-Atlantiques...
  
  ) - "acid portraits of those who played at being members of the Resistance" Winner of the Prix Goncourt
  Prix Goncourt
  The Prix Goncourt is a prize in French literature, given by the académie Goncourt to the author of "the best and most imaginative prose work of the year"...
  
   1947.
• Gibier de Potence (1949; Lucifer's Dream) -"an acid picture of postwar Paris".
• Chers corbeaux (1951) - "targets the Parisian bourgeoisie who had done well out of the Nazi occupation"
• Les Justes Causes (1954; The Side of the Angels) about the liberation of Paris.
• La Parade (1960) "a devastating satire on rich old provincial upper-class drones".
• Le Jeune couple (1967) "dealt with the splendours and miseries of .. 'consumer society'".
• Le Mauvais choix (1984) "attacked Christian bigotry. It is his only historical novel, set in the third century AD."

External links

• Obituary, by James Kirkup
  James Kirkup
  James Falconer Kirkup, FRSL was a prolific English poet, translator and travel writer. He was brought up in South Shields, and educated at South Shields Secondary School and Durham University. He wrote over 30 books, including autobiographies, novels and plays...
  
  , The Independent
  The Independent
  The Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...
  
  , 14 November 1995
• Biography, from French Academy (French)