Vercors

Related Category: French Literature: Biographies

(vĕrkôr´), 1902–91, French writer and illustrator, whose original name was Jean Bruller. Vercors served in the French resistance movement and helped to found Les Éditions de Minuit, which began as an underground publishing firm. For them he wrote Le Silence de la mer (1942, tr. The Silence of the Sea, 1944). This story and the later La marche à l'étoile (1943) deal with the moral impossibility of collaboration with the Germans. Among his many later works are Les Yeux et la lumière (1948), Sylva (1961, tr. 1962), Quota (1966, tr. 1966), and Sillages (1972).