Pierre Gripari
Encyclopedia
Pierre Gripari was a French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 writer.

Life

Born to a Greek
Greece
Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....

 father and a French mother, he was orphaned in 1944 and had to interrupt his studies and support himself with various jobs.
He served in the airborne troops, from 1946 to 1949.
From 1950 to 1957, he was employed by Mobil Oil, and was delegate of CGT
Confédération générale du travail
The General Confederation of Labour is a national trade union center, the first of the five major French confederations of trade unions.It is the largest in terms of votes , and second largest in terms of membership numbers.Its membership decreased to 650,000 members in 1995-96 The General...

 trade union.

He took up writing at an early age but did not consider his works fit for publishing until the late 1950s.

In 1959, he published his autobiography, Pierrot-la-lune, which was a critical success. He gained notoriety with his 1962 play Lieutenant Tenant, but his later works were commercially unsuccessful. Pierre Gripari kept publishing his books thanks to the support of publisher L'Age d'Homme, but only gained real fame and success in the late 1970s, thanks to the publishing of his children's book Contes de la rue Broca. Until his death, he was more known to French audiences as a children's author.

He was also theater critic for the newspaper Écrits de Paris.

A member of the french communist party
French Communist Party
The French Communist Party is a political party in France which advocates the principles of communism.Although its electoral support has declined in recent decades, the PCF retains a large membership, behind only that of the Union for a Popular Movement , and considerable influence in French...

 in the 1950s, Gripari strongly distanced himself from communism after the 1956 Khrushchev report and gradually evolved towards unconventional political ideas which could be considered far right
Far right
Far-right, extreme right, hard right, radical right, and ultra-right are terms used to discuss the qualitative or quantitative position a group or person occupies within right-wing politics. Far-right politics may involve anti-immigration and anti-integration stances towards groups that are...

. He was often critical of the political and religious influence of the Jews
Jews
The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...

, and was branded by some critics as anti-Semitic.

Gripari was openly gay
Gay
Gay is a word that refers to a homosexual person, especially a homosexual male. For homosexual women the specific term is "lesbian"....

 and often wrote on gay themes, but his work often borders on the surreal
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....

 and includes several parodies of literary genres.

He died December 23, 1990 at St. Joseph hospital in Paris, following a surgery, he was cremated at the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise January 4, 1991.
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