It was also with him that he secretly crossed the Pyrenees to London and joined the Free French Forces of General de Gaulle. A war correspondent from 1939-40, after the defeat, he joined the Résistance (Carte network) with his nephew Maurice Druon. Kessel belonged to the crew that Pierre Lazareff had gathered at Paris-Soir, and which comprised the golden age of the great reporters. After The Crew (1923), he published Mary of Cork, The Captives (recipient of the Grand Prix for the Novel from the Académie Française in 1926), Nuits de princes, Les Coeurs Pure, Belle de Jour (made into a film by Bunuel), Fortune Square (which was the fictional version of his report Slave Market), The Children of Luck, as well as a biography of Mermoz, the heroic aviator who had been his friend, and other books. His first work, La steppe rouge, was a collection of short stories about the Bolshevik Revolution. The son of Samuel Kessel, a Jewish physician of Lithuanian origin, Joseph Kessel lived in Argentina during his early life and was then taken to Orenburg, on the Urals, where his parents lived from 1905 to 1908, before returning to France.
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