Anatole France (1844-1924), the nom de plume of Anatole-Francois Thibault, began his literary career working for a publisher and writing weekly articles for the Univers Illustr�. His first book of poems, Les po�ms dor�s, was published in 1875, and his first successful novel, Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard, appeared in 1881 and won a prize from the French Academy. The most prominent French man of letters of his time, he was elected to the French Academy in 1896, and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1921 for "the most remarkable literary work of idealistic stamp."
