Bernard Frank
Bernard Frank is a journalist and writer born 11 October 1929 in Neuilly sur Seine.
Bernard Frank was raised in a comfortable family, where his father was a bank manager. After his baccalauréat, he started a Khâgne at the Lycée Pasteur but was expelled for bad conduct. He tried again to complete his preparatory classes at the lycée Condorcet, but abandoned them out of boredom during the second trimester.
At the age of 20, he met Jean-Paul Sartre who entrusted him on a trail basis with a column in his magazine, Les Temps Modernes. He remained a periodic contributor, but after publication of his novel Les Rats (1953), he fell out with the magazine's management.
During 1952-1953, he was in charge of the literary column in l'Observateur, as a substitute for Maurice Nadeau. Beginning his work on the weekly with a double page which he dedicated to Drieu la Rochelle, following which he aligned himself with the "les Hussards" literary movement, along with Roger Nimier et Antoine Blondin .
He also contributed to le Monde, the Cahier des saisons, the Nouveau Candide, and l'Actualité.
Every autmun he disparaged the nominees for literary prizes; judging that they had published too many poor novels, and mocked colleagues who found genius in the slightest nuance of the season and just to push it, would double his ridicule just to wind them up." [1]
At the end of 1961, he met the journalist Jean Daniel while hospitalised in a Neuilly clinic, where their mutual friend, the editor Claude Perdriel, thought "perhaps maliciously [2]" to introduce them to one another. He contributed to the Nouvel Observateur in the latter half of the 1960s.
He won the Prix des Deux Magots in 1971 for "un Siècle débordé", and the prix Roger Nimier in 1981 for "Solde". That year he began a literary column in the daily Le Matin de Paris before rejoining Le Monde in 1985 and then Le Nouvel Observateur en 1989.
Works
- 1952 : Grognards et hussards
- 1953 : Géographie universelle
- 1953 : Les Rats
- 1955 : Israël
- 1955 : L'Illusion comique
- 1956 : Le Dernier des Mohicans
- 1958 : La Panoplie littéraire
- 1970 : Un Siècle débordé
- 1980 : Solde
- 2001(?) : Portraits et Aphorismes
Notes
- Translated from the French wiki article Bernard Frank 10 May 06