Anatole France

Anatole France was a French novelist and critic, the son of a Paris bookseller, who grew up among the quays and secondhand stalls that fill his fiction. Elegant, sceptical and ironic, he was elected to the Académie française and won the Nobel Prize in 1921. He was also a public combatant, siding with Zola over the Dreyfus affair when it cost friendships to do so.