Jean Paulhan

Who was Jean Paulhan?

Jean Paulhan was a French writer, literary critic and publisher, director of the literary magazine Nouvelle Revue Française from 1925 to 1940 and from 1946 to 1968. He was a member of the Académie française. He was born in Nîmes and died in Paris. From 1908 to 1910 he worked as a teacher in Madagascar, and he later translated Malagasy poems, or Hainteny, into French;

Paulhan's translations attracted the interest of Guillaume Apollinaire and Paul Éluard.

In 1925 Paulhan succeeded Jacques Rivière as editor of the NRF. One of his most famous works of literary criticism was The Flowers of Tarbes, or Terror in Literature, a study of the nature of language in fiction. Paulhan also wrote several autobiographical short stories; English translations of several appeared in the collection Progress in Love on the Slow Side. During the Second World War, Paulhan was an early and active member of the French Resistance and was arrested by the German Gestapo. After the war he founded Cahiers de la Pléiade and in 1953 re-launched La Nouvelle Revue Française.

Author Anne Desclos revealed that she had written the novel Story of O as a series of love letters to her lover Paulhan, who had admired the work of the Marquis de Sade.