Gerard Reve

Born in Amsterdam to a Communist journalist father, Reve worked briefly as a journalist himself before publishing The Evenings (1947) at twenty-three to instant, divisive acclaim and outrage over its flat, nihilistic voice, shocking to a postwar Dutch culture still clinging to reconstruction-era earnestness.

The novel follows Frits van Egters through ten December evenings of profound boredom, morbid private jokes, and quiet dread of the life ahead of him, its comic deadpan concealing real postwar exhaustion; it was later voted the best Dutch novel of the twentieth century in a national poll.

He later converted publicly to Catholicism, adopted 'Gerard Reve' as a pseudonym-turned-legal-name, and became one of the 'Great Three' of postwar Dutch fiction alongside Hermans and Mulisch, as famous for his flamboyant, openly gay public persona as for his fiction. He died in Belgium in 2006.