He confessed in a letter to the publisher Jonathan Williams that his life had been "one of struggling to keep my belly filled and my children's bellies filled, and no time whatever for literary pre-occupations".
Despite the German occupation, literary life had managed to flourish along with the other arts: Picasso continued to paint in Paris, and "Les Enfants du Paradis", produced at the time, is regarded as one of the dozen or so best films ever made.
"Archives of Literary Life under the Occupation," which runs until July 9 and is free of charge, is about words — millions of them, splashed across the front pages of newspapers, scribbled in tiny notebooks, drawn up as lists of books banned (and burned) by the Nazis, written in anguished letters to friends or elliptical appeals to officials on behalf of friends.
One of the astonishing things about the exhibition "Between Collaboration and Resistance: French Literary Life Under Nazi Occupation," at the New York Public Library, is that it feels as if we were looking at scores of relics tossed from speeding trains, each of them heading in a different direction, each expressing different hopes and expectations.
Now there were some influential magazines in play; literary criticism was recognisably the occupation we know today.
To initiate real change on a shorter scale, we need to introduce more literary classes in schools, promote occupations that the humanities encompass, and simply discuss literary or social questions in our everyday lives.
His literary career had started during the Occupation with the publication in 1942, of "L'Etranger", the first of his novels.
It is about the complicated, contradictory and painful choices made by French literary figures during and after the Nazi occupation.
This literary tradition probably reflects the Sea Peoples' occupation of Cyprus (c. 1193 bc), Teucer perhaps representing Tjekker of the Egyptian records.
In the letters he described no occupation beyond giving lectures on literary subjects to young men, whose moral growth he sought to mentor.
