Céline, Louis-Ferdinand (1894-1961)

French novelist. His writings aroused controversy over their cynicism and misanthropy. His best-known work is Voyage au bout de la nuit/Journey to the End of the Night (1932).

Later novels include Mort à crédit/Death on the Installment Plan (1936), Guignol's Band (1944), D'un château à l'autre/From Castle to Castle (1956), Nord/North (1960), and the posthumously published Le Pont de Londres/London Bridge (1964; the second volume of Guignol's Band).

Among his other writings are a play, L'Eglise/The Church (1933); La Vie et l'oeuvre de Semmelweis/The Life and Works of Semmelweis (his 1924 doctoral thesis, published 1936; Semmelweis was a 19th-century Hungarian surgeon); an anticommunist pamphlet, Mea culpa (1936), and three works in which he expressed a violent and perhaps paranoiac anti-Semitism, Bagatelles pour un massacre/Trifles for a Massacre (1937), L'Ecole des cadavres/The School of Cadavers (1938), and Les Beaux Draps/The Fine Mess (1941).