Wurmser, André

Born Apr. 27, 1899, in Paris. French writer, journalist, and critic. Member of the French Communist Party since 1934.

During the Hitlerite occupation of France (194(M4), Wurmser participated in the Resistance Movement and published the underground newspaper Le Patriote du Sud-Ouest. After the liberation of France he became vice-president of the National Federation of the French Press, and in 1954 he joined the editorial board of the newspaper L’Humanite. His first novel, Change of Owners, was published in 1928. During 1946-55 he published a seven-volume cycle of novels A Man Goes Into the World, a realistic, although slightly schematic, narrative of how a bourgeois intellectual becomes a Communist. Wurmser’s publicistic work includes political commentaries in L’Humanite, compiled in the book But … Says Andre Wurmser (1961). In 1960 he published the collection of essays The USSR With an Open Heart (with L. Mammiac; Russian translation, 1961) and in 1964 The Inhuman Comedy (reissued, 1965; Russian translation, 1967), an interesting, although at times disputable, attempt at a Marxist analysis of the life and works of H. Balzac.