Vercors (pseud. of Jean Bruller) (1902-91). Novelist and publisher. He began as an illustrator, then in World War II assumed his now-celebrated role as editor of the clandestine Éditions de Minuit, linked to the London Cahiers du Silence. His influential novella Le Silence de la mer (1942) charts moral resistance through silence to the seductions of the cultured ‘good’ German, and embodies in a girl and an old man paradoxes of weakness and strength. La Marche à l'étoile (1943) describes the plight of patriotic French Jews betrayed by fellow countrymen. His later novels are analyses of collaboration and corruption, or humanist fables.
[Margaret Callander]
