Georges Perec

Perec's father died fighting in the French army in 1940; his mother, a hairdresser, was deported and murdered at Auschwitz. Raised afterward by an aunt and uncle, he carried that unspoken loss into virtually everything he wrote, most directly in W, or the Memory of Childhood, which braids a sinister boy's-adventure fable with fragmentary memories of his own erased origins.

He joined the Oulipo constraint-writing group in 1967 and threw himself into its games with unmatched intensity, writing La Disparition, a 300-page novel containing not a single letter 'e,' as much a feat of mourning as of virtuosity, the missing letter standing in for everything unsayable. Life A User's Manual, reconstructing an entire Paris apartment building room by room in one frozen moment, won the Prix Médicis and is his acknowledged masterpiece. He died of lung cancer in 1982, only forty-five.