Jean Bruller

Jean Marcel Adolphe Bruller (26 February 1902 – 10 June 1991) was a French writer and illustrator who co-founded the publishing company Les Éditions de Minuit with Pierre de Lescure.

Born to a Hungarian-Jewish father,^[1]^[2] he joined the Resistance during the World War II occupation of northern France and his texts were published using the pseudonym Vercors (though he used this name for works published before the 1944 Battle of Vercors).

Several of his novels have fantasy or science fiction themes. The 1952 novel Les Animaux dénaturés (translated into English variously as You Shall Know Them, Borderline, and The Murder of the Missing Link) was made into the movie Skullduggery (1970) featuring Burt Reynolds and Susan Clark,^[3] and examines the question of what it means to be human.

Colères (translated into English as The Insurgents) is about the quest for immortality.^[4] In 1960 he published Sylva, a novel about a fox who becomes a woman, inspired by David Garnett's novel Lady into Fox (1922). The English-language version, translated by his wife Rita Barisse, was a finalist for the 1963 Hugo Award for Best Novel.^[5]

His historical novel Anne Boleyn (1985) presents a very intelligent Anne as having determinedly set about marrying Henry VIII of England in order to separate England from Papal power and strengthen England's independence.

^ Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956, NYU Press (2011), p. 133
^ Cristina Solé Castells, "Vercos and the Second World War" in Manuel Bragança & Peter Tame (ed.), The Long Aftermath: Cultural Legacies of Europe at War, 1936–2016, Berghahn Books (2015), p. 175
^ Skullduggery (1970) at IMDB
^ John Clute and Peter Nicholls, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, St. Martin's Press, 1993, ISBN 0-312-09618-6
^ List of Hugo nominees Archived 20 September 2011 at the Wayback Machine

[1] Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956, NYU Press (2011), p. 133

[2] Cristina Solé Castells, "Vercos and the Second World War" in Manuel Bragança & Peter Tame (ed.), The Long Aftermath: Cultural Legacies of Europe at War, 1936–2016, Berghahn Books (2015), p. 175

[3] Skullduggery (1970) at IMDB

[4] John Clute and Peter Nicholls, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, St. Martin's Press, 1993, ISBN 0-312-09618-6

[5] List of Hugo nominees Archived 20 September 2011 at the Wayback Machine

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