Romain Gary

Romain Gary was born in 1914 in Vilnius, Lithuania (then Poland). A Jew of Russian origin, he emigrated with his mother to Nice in 1928. In 1940 he joined General de Gaulle and the Free French Forces in London and fought as a navigator in the "Lorraine" squadron until the end of the war. Wounded, he received the highest decoration of the French combatants. Compagnon de la Libération and was one of the few survivors of the two hundred men in the squadron. The success of his early novels, European Education and The Roots of Heaven (The Goncourt Prize in 1956) immediately made him a world-famous writer. He held several diplomatic posts in Europe and the USA. In 1975, writing under the pseudonym Émile Ajar, he won the Goncourt Prize again (an "impossible" feat in the prize's history) with A Life Ahead of YouGary committed suicide in 1980, a little over a year after the suicide of his ex-wife Jean Seberg. He left behind a small booklet entitled Life and Death of Émile Ajar, an extraordinary text where he revealed the "mystification" of Ajar.