Boris Vian

Boris Vian, born 10 March 1920 in Ville-d'Avray (Seine-et-Oise) and died 23 June 1959 in Paris, was a French writer, poet, lyricist, engineer, singer, music critic, jazz musician (trumpeter), and artistic director.

Trained as an engineer at École Centrale, Vian also worked as a screenwriter, translator (American English), lecturer, actor, and painter.

Under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan, he published several novels in American style, including J'irai cracher sur vos tombes, which caused a scandal and led to a notorious trial. While Vernon Sullivan's writings brought Boris Vian legal and tax troubles, they enriched him so much that he said "Vernon Sullivan supported Boris Vian". He used other pseudonyms, sometimes as anagrams, like Bison Ravi or Brisavion, to sign numerous works.

Boris Vian practiced multiple literary genres: poetry, documents, chronicles, short stories, plays, and film scripts. His work is a treasure trove in which new manuscripts continue to be discovered in the 21st century. His bibliography remains difficult to date, as he himself often did not date his manuscripts. Thus, researchers such as Noël Arnaud and Claude J. Rameil do not always agree on publication dates with those close to the author.

He was also the author of paintings, drawings, and sketches, displayed as an appendix to La Nouvelle Revue française in 1946. An exhibition at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France was dedicated to him in 2011-2012.

For fifteen years, he promoted jazz, which he played from 1937 at the Hot Club de France. His chronicles, published in Combat, Jazz-hot, and Arts, were collected in 1982: Écrits sur le jazz. He created forty-eight radio broadcasts Jazz in Paris, with texts in English and French for a New York radio station, manuscripts published in bilingual edition in 1996.

His literary work, little appreciated in his lifetime, was praised from 1960-1970 onward. L'Écume des jours, with its wordplay and coded characters, became a classic, studied in schools and high schools.

"Though his brief life multiplied the most diverse activities, his name now stands among the most significant in French literature."

Reputedly pessimistic, Boris Vian loved the absurd, celebration, and play. He invented words and systems including imaginary machines and terms that became common. He developed original invention projects while studying at École Centrale Paris. His most famous imaginary machine remained the pianocktail, an instrument for making drinks while being carried along by music.

Boris Vian died in 1959 (at age 39) from a heart attack during a screening of the film adaptation of his book J'irai cracher sur vos tombes. An admirer of Alfred Jarry and certain forms of surrealism, his membership in the College of 'Pataphysics made him a Satrap, to whom the college pays homage by announcing the "apparent death of the Transcendent Satrap".