Marcel Brion

Marcel Brion (1895, Marseille – 1984, Paris) was a French essayist, literary critic, novelist, and historian.

Biography

The son of a lawyer, Brion was classmates in Thiers with Marcel Pagnol and Albert Cohen. After completing his secondary education in Champittet, Switzerland, he studied law at the University of Aix-en-Provence. Counsel to the bar of Marseille between 1920 and 1924, he abandoned his legal career to turn to literature.

Brion wrote nearly a hundred books in his career, ranging from historical biography to examinations of Italian and German art, and turning later in life to novels. His most famous collection of stories is the 1942 Les Escales de la Haute Nuit (The Shore Leaves Of The Deepest Night). An essay of Brion appears in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, the important 1929 critical appreciation of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

He was a friend of the philosopher Xavier Tilliette.

In 1964, Brion was elected to the French Academy chair 33, replacing his friend Jean-Louis Vaudoyer. Other distinctions include membership in the Légion d'honneur, the Croix de guerre 1914–1918, a Grand Officer in the French Ordre national du Mérite, and an Officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

The 1982 television program The Romantic Spirit, which aired in the U.S. on the A&E Network from 1985-1991, credits Brion as having "devised" the series.

His son, Patrick Brion, critic and film historian, is the "voice" of Cinema midnight on France 3.

Sources

This article incorporates information from the equivalent article on the French Wikipedia.

Cultural offices
Preceded by Jean-Louis Vaudoyer	Seat 33 Académie française 1964–1984	Succeeded by Michel Mohrt

Persondata
Name	Brion, Marcel
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Short description
Date of birth	1895
Place of birth
Date of death	1984
Place of death