SOURCE: "Louis-Ferdinand Céline: An Introduction," in Critical Essays on Louis-Ferdinand Céline, edited by William K. Buckley, G. K. Hall, 1989, pp. 100-10.

In the following essay, O'Connell provides an overview of Céline's literary career, novels, and critical reception.

In the last twenty years, Louis-Ferdinand Céline has emerged and, in the opinion of most major critics, joined Proust as one of the two greatest novelists of the twentieth century. This change in his literary fortunes is one of the most interesting stories in modern literature, and is understandable if one remembers that Céline's work was surrounded by what amounts to a conspiracy of silence by French (mostly leftist) intellectuals from the end of World War II until about the mid-sixties. Having been accused of collaborating with the Nazis during the war, it took almost twenty years for his name to be cleared. Once it became...