Roger Vailland (French writer and journalist) Add a review

Roger François Vailland (French pronunciation: [ʁɔʒe vajɑ̃]; 16 October 1907 – 12 May 1965) was a French novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright and screenwriter. His published work includes nine novels, three plays, political and literary essays, travel books, film scripts, war reporting, an extensive body of journalism, correspondence and a posthumously published private journal.

As a schoolboy in Reims, Vailland helped form the Phrères Simplistes, the group from which the avant-garde magazine and collective Le Grand Jeu developed. He proposed the magazine's title and played a substantial part in devising its editorial programme. Although the Grand Jeu belonged to the wider surrealist milieu, it remained independent of the organisation directed by André Breton.

Vailland began working for the Paris press in 1928 and became a senior reporter for Paris-Soir. During the 1930s he travelled widely, wrote serial fiction and film criticism, cultivated the public manner of a dandy and used opium regularly. During the Second World War he underwent treatment for addiction, joined the French Resistance and began writing fiction in earnest. His first novel, Drôle de jeu (1945), drew on his experience of underground resistance and won the Prix Interallié.

Vailland formally joined the French Communist Party in 1952, after several years as a fellow traveller, but became disillusioned following Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin and the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. He gradually withdrew from the party and ceased renewing his membership in 1959. His novel La Loi won the Prix Goncourt in 1957. His later work continued to explore political power, social class, libertinage, rules and games, and the pursuit of what he called individual "sovereignty".