Jean Dutourd

Jean Gwenaël Dutourd (French: [dytuʁ]; 14 January 1920 – 17 January 2011) was a French novelist.

Dutourd was born in Paris. His mother died when he was seven years old. At the age of twenty, he was taken prisoner fifteen days after Germany's invasion of France in World War II. He escaped six weeks later and returned to Paris where he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. He entered the Resistance and was again arrested in early 1944. He escaped and took part in the Liberation of Paris. He was a candidate for the Democratic Union of Labour (UDT) in the legislative elections of 1967.

His first work, Le Complexe de César, appeared in 1946 and received the Prix Stendhal.

On July 14, 1978, a bomb destroyed his apartment, planted by people who disliked his writing style. Parisian intellectuals were somewhat dismayed, as they had not generally caused such a stir with their own writings. This incident, however, had a happy consequence: Jean Dutourd was elected to the Académie française, to the seat of Jacques Rueff, on November 30 of the same year (seat 31)retrieved 18/1/2026, https://web.archive.org/web/20110120192356/http://www.lepost.fr/article/2011/01/18/2374655_mort-le-l-ecrivain-jean-dutourd.html.

In 1997 he was elected as a member of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in the Department of Language and Literature.

Dutourd died in Paris on 17 January 2011, at the age of 91.