Twentieth century French literature did not undergo an isolated development and reveals the influence of writers and genres from around the world, including Walt Whitman, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Franz Kafka, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Luigi Pirandello, the British and American detective novel, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, Bertolt Brecht and many others.
Important foreign writers who have lived and worked in France (especially Paris) in the twentieth century include: Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, William S. Burroughs, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Julio Cortázar, Vladimir Nabokov, Edith Wharton and Eugène Ionesco.
For African-Americans in the twentieth century (such as James Baldwin), France was also more accepting of race and permitted greater freedom (in a similar way, Jazz was embraced by the French faster than in some areas in America).
The theater director Jacques Copeau emphasized training an actor to be a complete person and rejected the Italian stage for something closer to the Elizabethan model, and his vision would have a profound impact on the "Cartel" of the 1920s and 1930s (see below).
The poetic dramas of Edmond Rostand, especially Cyrano de Bergerac in 1897, were immensely popular at the start of the 20th century, as too the "well-made" plays and bourgeois farces of Georges Feydeau.
Paul Léautaud (1872–1956) was the author of a highly original personal diary chronicling the life of the Parisian literary world in the first half of the 20th century in his monumental 13-volume "Journal Littéraire", considered to be "the greatest study of character ever written" by Mavis Gallant, and "more devastating in its truthfulness than the Confessions of Rousseau" by his biographer James Harding.
The group championed previous writers they saw as radical (Arthur Rimbaud, the Comte de Lautréamont, Baudelaire, Raymond Roussel) and promoted an anti-bourgeois philosophy (particularly with regards to sex and politics) which would later lead most of them to join the communist party.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's novels—such as Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of Night) -- used an elliptical, oral, and slang-derived style to rail against the hypocrisies and moral lapses of his generation (his anti-semitic tracts in the 1940s, however, led to his condemnation for collaboration).
The 1930s and 1940s saw significant contributions by citizens of French colonies, as Albert Camus or Aimé Césaire, the latter whom created, along with Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas the literary review L'Étudiant Noir, which was a forerunner of the Négritude movement.
The 1950s and 1960s were highly turbulent times in France: despite a dynamic economy ("les trente glorieuses" or "30 Glorious Years"), the country was torn by their colonial heritage (Vietnam and Indochina, Algeria), by their collective sense of guilt from the Vichy Regime, by their desire for renewed national prestige (Gaullism), and by conservative social tendencies in education and industry.
The works, positions and thinking of Albert Camus are also emblematic of a reckoning in the French intellectual circles of post World War II, signaling the moral imperative to distance from Communism.
To a certain degree, these developments closely paralleled changes in cinema in the same period (the Nouvelle Vague).Furthermore, French writing's about the course of the recent world war were plentiful, with many works, such as Au Revoir Les Enfants by Louis Malle becomg widespread and popular
The writers Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, Jacques Roubaud are associated with the creative movement Oulipo (founded in 1960) which uses elaborate mathematical strategies and constraints (such as lipograms and palindromes) as a means of triggering ideas and inspiration.
Poets working within these philosophical/language concerns—especially concentrated around the review "L'Ephémère"—include Yves Bonnefoy, André du Bouchet, Jacques Dupin, Claude Esteban, Roger Giroux and Philippe Jaccottet.
This Francophone literature includes the prize-winning novels of Tahar ben Jelloun (Morocco), Patrick Chamoiseau (Martinique), Amin Maalouf (Lebanon) and Assia Djebar (Algeria).