In 1905, he was awarded his Certificat d'études, after which he worked as an apprentice and messenger boy in various trades. His father was a middle manager in an insurance company and his mother owned a boutique where she sold antique lace. The family came originally from Normandy on his father's side and Brittany on his mother's side.

The only child of Fernand Destouches and Marguerite-Louise-Céline Guilloux, he was born Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches in 1894 at Courbevoie, just outside Paris in the Seine département (now Hauts-de-Seine). Céline is widely considered to be one of the greatest French novelists of the twentieth century, but remains a controversial figure in France due to his antisemitism and activities during the Second World War. He returned to France where he resumed his careers as a doctor and author. He was convicted of collaboration by a French court in 1951, but was pardoned by a military tribunal soon after. He continued to publicly espouse antisemitic views during the German occupation of France, and after the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944 he fled to Germany and then Denmark where he lived in exile.

Maurice Nadeau wrote: 'What Joyce did for the English language…what the surrealists attempted to do for the French language, Céline achieved effortlessly and on a vast scale.' įrom 1937 Céline wrote a series of antisemitic polemical works in which he advocated a military alliance with Nazi Germany. In subsequent novels such as Death on the Installment Plan (1936), Guignol's Band (1944) and Castle to Castle (1957) Céline further developed an innovative and distinctive literary style. His first novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932) won the Prix Renaudot but divided critics due to the author's pessimistic depiction of the human condition and his writing style based on working class speech. Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches ( – 1 July 1961), better known by the pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline ( / s eɪ ˈ l iː n/ say- LEEN, French: ( listen)) was a French novelist, polemicist, and physician.

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