1. Louis Guilloux was a Breton writer born in Saint-Brieuc, Brittany, where he lived throughout his life.
12 Facts About Louis Guilloux
1. 2.
Louis Guilloux is known for his Social Realist novels describing working-class life and political struggles in the mid-twentieth century.
3.
Guilloux's father was a shoemaker and socialist activist, a background that Guilloux describes in his first book La Maison du Peuple, which centres on the struggles of a shoemaker called Quere as seen through the eyes of his young son.
4.
In high school, Louis Guilloux befriended the philosophy tutor Georges Palante, an anarchist thinker who later killed himself.
5.
Palante's despair inspired Louis Guilloux to create the character of Cripure, the anguished anti-hero of Le Sang Noir, which is considered his masterpiece.
6.
Louis Guilloux was well known for his fluency in the English language.
7.
Louis Guilloux married in 1924, and published La Maison du Peuple in 1927.
8.
Louis Guilloux was a translator of a number of books, including the novel Home to Harlem written by black American author Claude McKay, published in 1932 under the title Ghetto Noir.
9.
Louis Guilloux knew the philosopher Jean Grenier from his teenage years, and was close to Albert Camus.
10.
Louis Guilloux was friends with Andre Malraux and Jean Guehenno.
11.
Louis Guilloux was Secretary of the first World Congress of Anti-fascist Writers in 1935, then became head of Red Aid International, which helped refugees from Nazi Germany and later assisted the Spanish Republicans.
12.
Louis Guilloux died in Saint-Brieuc in 1980 and was buried in the Cimetiere Saint-Michel.