Jean-Louis Curtis

Who was Jean-Louis Curtis?

Jean-Louis Curtis, pseudonym of Louis Laffitte, was a French novelist best known for his second novel The Forests of the Night, which won France's highest literary award the Prix Goncourt in 1947. He is the author of over 30 novels.

Curtis was born in Orthez, Pyrénées-Atlantiques. He was one of the founders of the literary monthly La Table Ronde in 1948. He was elected to the Académie française in 1986.

Martin Seymour-Smith said of Curtis in the early 1980s:

He is one of the best of the 'conventional' novelists now writing in France, but is very uneven: he is not worried about originality of technique, and prefers to concentrate on what he can do well, which is to anatomize bourgeois societies and 'artistic' communities.

The author Michel Houellebecq made a homage to him in a long passage in La carte et le territoire.