Joseph Heller

Louis-Ferdinand Céline was the pen name of Louis-Ferdinand Destouches .He was a French writer and physician. The name Céline was the first name of his grandmother. He is considered one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, developing a new style of writing that... modernized both French and world literature. The only child of Ferdinand-Auguste Destouches and Marguerite-Louise-Céline Guilloux, he was born Louis-Ferdinand-Auguste Destouches in 1894 at Courbevoie, just outside Paris in the Seine département . His father was a minor functionary in an insurance firm and his mother was a lacemaker. In 1905 he was awarded his Certificat d'études, after which he worked as an apprentice and messenger boy in various trades. Between 1908 and 1910 his parents sent him to Germany and England for a year in each country in order to acquire foreign languages for future employment. From the time he left school, until the age of eighteen, Céline worked various jobs, leaving or losing them after only short periods of time.
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Jaroslav Hašek was a Czech humorist, satirist, writer and socialist anarchist best known for his novel The Good Soldier Švejk, an unfinished collection of farcical incidents about a soldier in World War I and a satire on the ineptitude of authority figures, which has been translated into... sixty languages. He also wrote some 1,500 short stories. He was a journalist, bohemian, and practical joker. Hašek was born in Prague, Bohemia , the son of high-school math teacher Josef Hašek and his wife Kateřina. Poverty forced the family, with three children — another son Bohuslav, three years Hašek's younger, and an orphan cousin Maria — to move often, more than ten times during his infancy. He never knew a real home, and this rootlessness clearly influenced his life of wanderlust. When he was thirteen, Hašek's father died from excessive alcohol intake, and his mother was unable to raise him firmly. The teenage boy dropped out of high school at the age of 15 to become a druggist, but eventually graduated from business school.
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William March was an American author and a highly decorated US Marine. The author of six novels and four short-story collections, March was praised by critics and heralded as "the unrecognized genius of our time", without attaining popular appeal until after his death. March grew up in rural... Alabama in a family so poor that he could not finish regular high school. He later studied law, but was unable to afford finishing his studies. In 1917, while working in a Manhattan law office, he volunteered for the US Marines and saw action in World War I, for which he was decorated with some of the highest honors—the French Croix de Guerre and the American Distinguished Service Cross and the Navy Cross. Back stateside, he again worked in a law office and then began a career in business which brought him financial success. He also began writing, first short stories, and in 1933 published a novel, Company K, based on his war experiences, but literary success eluded him.
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Albert Camus ; 7 November 1913 – 4 January 1960 was a French author, journalist, and philosopher of the 20th century. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of... André Breton. Camus was awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature "for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times". He was the second-youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, after Rudyard Kipling, and the first African-born writer to receive the award. He is the shortest-lived of any Nobel literature laureate to date, having died in an automobile accident just over two years after receiving the award. Although often cited as a proponent of existentialism, the philosophy with which Camus was associated during his own lifetime, he rejected this particular label. In an interview in 1945, Camus rejected any ideological associations: "No, I am not an existentialist.
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