Louis-Ferdinand Celine (1894 - 1961) was a French author, medical doctor, and anarchist-hence the above quote to a friend. During WW2 he worked as a ships doctor even though he invalided out of military service. He is best known for the long and pessimistic book 'Long Day's Journey Into Night', though 'Death on Credit' and more recently 'War' are all popular in English translation.
Sixty years after his death an archive of Celine's papers taken in1944 from a Paris flat he lived in during WW2 was handed over to the French state literary authorities for cataloguing and publication, where, apart from the sheer quantity of the papers to be examined, the streaks of misanthropy and antisemitism in his work remains difficult to process.
Even the French like their literary anarchists to be affirmative about their anarchy.
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