His first novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932) won the Prix Renaudot but divided critics due to the author's pessimistic depiction of the human condition and his writing style based on working-class speech.

He continued to publicly espouse antisemitic views during the German occupation of France, and after the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944, he fled to Germany and then Denmark where he lived in exile.

[7] In 1912, Céline volunteered for the French army (in what he described as an act of rebellion against his parents)[8] and began a three-year enlistment in the 12th Cuirassier Regiment stationed in Rambouillet.

He worked as an overseer on a plantation and a trading post, and ran a pharmacy for the local inhabitants, procuring essential medical supplies from his parents in France.

[15] In March 1918, Céline was employed by the Rockefeller Foundation as part of a team travelling around Brittany delivering information sessions on tuberculosis and hygiene.

In his spare time he worked on his first novel, Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night), which was dedicated to Elizabeth, completing it in late 1931.

The novel attracted admirers and detractors across the political spectrum, with some praising its anarchist, anticolonialist and antimilitarist themes while one critic condemned it as "the cynical, jeering confessions of a man without courage or nobility."

When the prize was awarded to Mazeline's Les Loups, the resulting scandal increased publicity for Céline's novel which sold 50,000 copies in the following two months.

[26] Céline initially refused to take a public stance on the rise of Nazism and the increasing extreme-right political agitation in France, explaining to a friend in 1933: "I am and have always been an anarchist, I have never voted…I will never vote for anything or anybody…I don't believe in men….The Nazis loathe me as much as the socialists and the commies too.

[29] In August Céline visited Leningrad for a month and on his return quickly wrote, and had published, an essay, Mea Culpa, in which he denounced communism and the Soviet Union.

[34] He moved back to Montmartre and in February 1941 published a third polemical book Les beaux draps (A Fine Mess) in which he denounced Jews, Freemasons, the Catholic Church, the educational system and the French army.

[35] In October 1942, Céline's antisemitic books Bagatelles pour une massacre and L'école des cadavres were republished in new editions, only months after the round-up of French Jews at the Vélodrome d'Hiver.

[36] Céline devoted most of his time during the occupation years to his medical work and writing a new novel, Guignol's Band, a hallucinatory reworking of his experiences in London during World War I.

[38] When the Allies landed in France in June 1944, Céline and Lucette fled to Germany, eventually staying in Sigmaringen where the Germans had created an enclave accommodating the Vichy government in exile and collaborationist militia.

Using his connections with the German occupying forces, in particular with SS officer Hermann Bickler [de] who was often his guest in the apartment on Rue Girardon,[39][40] Céline obtained visas for German-occupied Denmark where he arrived in late March 1945.

[41] In November 1945 the new French government applied for Céline's extradition for collaboration, and the following month he was arrested and imprisoned at Vestre Prison by the Danish authorities pending the outcome of the application.

In 1948 he moved to a farmhouse on the coast of the Great Belt owned by his Danish lawyer where he worked on the novels which were to become Féerie pour une autre fois (1952, tr Fable for Another Time) and Normance (1954).

[44] Céline's first post-war novels, Féerie pour une autre fois and Normance, received little critical attention and sold poorly.

[45] However, his 1957 novel D'un château l'autre, a chronicle of his time in Sigmaringen, attracted considerable media and critical interest and revived the controversy over his wartime activities.

[48] Nevertheless, biographer Frédéric Vitoux concludes that: "through the ferocity of his voice and the respect in which it was held, Céline had made himself the most popular and most resounding spokesman of pre-war antisemitism.

Bernhard Payr [de], the German superintendent of propaganda in France, considered that Céline "started from correct racial notions" but his "savage, filthy slang" and "brutal obscenities" spoiled his "good intentions" with "hysterical wailing".

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, he expressed his support for Jacques Doriot's Legion of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism (LVF).

"[61] Literary critic Merlin Thomas notes that the experience of war marked Céline for life and it is a theme in all his novels except Death on the Installment Plan.

In Journey to the End of the Night, Céline presents the horror and stupidity of war as an implacable force which "turns the ordinary individual into an animal intent only on survival".

"If you are weak, then you will derive strength from stripping those you fear of all the prestige they pretend to possess (…) [T]he attitude of defiance just outlined is an element of hope and personal salvation.

[70] In his first two novels, Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan, Céline shocked many critics by his use of a unique language based on the spoken French of the working class, medical and nautical jargon, neologisms, obscenities, and the specialised slang of soldiers, sailors and the criminal underworld.

Thomas sees Céline's three dots as: "almost comparable to the pointing of a psalm: they divide the text into rhythmical rather than syntactical units, permit extreme variations of pace and make possible to a great extent the hallucinatory lyricism of his style.

[78] Patrick Modiano admires Céline as a stylist, and produced a parody of his style in his debut novel La place de l'étoile.

In 2011, the fiftieth anniversary of Céline's death, the writer had initially appeared on an official list of 500 people and events associated with French culture which were to be celebrated nationally that year.

[83] In December 2017, the French government and Jewish leaders expressed concern over plans by the publisher Gallimard to republish Céline's antisemitic books.