Louis-Ferdinand Celine horrified his readers in Journey to the End of Night (1932) and Death on the Installment Plan (1936), which draw upon his experiences as a doctor in the poor neighborhoods of Paris. The novels won him an international readership. Celine's world as portrayed in these books is brutal and violent-a place of filth, perversion, obscenity, perfidy, and crime. Yet critics have found what they called a fierce sincerity in his writing. A violent anti-Semite, Celine was a known collaborationist during the German occupation of France. Fleeing to Denmark after the collapse of Germany, he was imprisoned and later permitted to return to France, mentally unstable and partly… paralyzed. His linguistic exuberance recalls a vein of French writing going back through Hugo to Rabelais, and his style has greatly influenced such American writers as Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac.