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Boris Vian's American Movie: The Lost Authorship Of I Will Spit On Your Graves , M. Martin Guiney

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Boris Vian (1920-1959) is today considered one of France's foremost avant-garde novelists of the twentieth century, but in his lifetime he was known to a wide audience as the author of one work: J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (I Will Spit on Your Graves), a pastiche of American hard-boiled fiction which he published in 1946 under the name of a fictitious Black American author, Vernon Sullivan. Vian died twelve years later of heart failure while viewing the film adaptation, which he had no part in producing. Vian-as-author "died" long before that fateful moment, however: first when he perpetrated a …