Alain Bosquet; Poet, Novelist Wrote ‘A Russian Mother’

Alain Bosquet, 78, poet, novelist, editor, literary critic and professor. Born Anatole Bisk in Odessa, now Ukraine, Bosquet was a U.S. citizen based in New York for 10 years before moving to France. There he published his best-selling autobiographical novel, “A Russian Mother,” wrote some 50 books and collections of poetry and won every major French literary prize. During World War II, Bosquet served in the Belgian, French and U.S. armies, and after the war was with the Allied Control Council in occupied Berlin and then with the State Department. In New York, he co-founded the bilingual poetry magazine Hemispheres and helped edit the Voice of France, a Gaullist newspaper. He taught French literature at Brandeis University in Boston and American literature at the University of Lyons in France. Also in France, he wrote columns for Combat and Le Monde and criticism for the French National Broadcasting Office and Radio Canada. His last novel, published in 1997, was “Portrait of an Unhappy Billionaire.” On March 17 in Paris of cancer.