Author. He was a French novelist of the 20th century. His World War I novel, "Le Feu" or "Under Fire," received in 1916 the French prize for literature, the Prix Goncourt, and has remained a classic among war literature. A member of the Communist Party, he was a long-time friend of 1921 Nobel Prize recipient Albert Einstein. Born Henri Adrien Gustave Barbusse, the only son of three children, he had a sickly childhood with lung problems. When he was three years old, his English mother died. His father, Adrien Barbusse, was a journalist, who was persecuted for his protestant faith and was politically antimonarchy. As a teenager, he left his rural lifestyle for Paris, abandoning his traditional upbringings. In 1898 he married Helyonne, the youngest daughter of 19th century author Catulle Mendès and prolific composer Augusta Holmès. His wife's image, along with her sisters, was the subject of an Auguste Renoir 1888 painting "Les Filles de Catulle Mendès." In 1914 at the start of World War I, he enlisted at the age of 41 into the French Army, serving on the Western Front. Wounded in combat for the third time, he was left with chronic pulmonary and gastric illnesses. Unfit to return to combat, he was transferred to a desk position in November of 1915 where he was stationed until the end of the war. For his war service, he was decorated on June 8, 1915 with the Croix de guerre with citation. Before the war, he had written poetry and a novel with little success. Documenting the brutally realistic account of the French Sixth Battalion in the trenches during World War I, "Under Fire" was his first successful novel. He told in detail how half the men in his battalion were killed in action. By the time of the book's full popularity, he had become a pacifist with his next writings being anti-military in the magazine "Clarte'." In January of 1918, he traveled to Moscow before the fall of the Russian Empire, where he married a Russian bride. He became political, joining the Bolshevik Party, which became the Communist Party. He wrote "Light from the Abyss" in 1919, "Words of a Fighting Man" in 1920 and "The Knife Between My Teeth" in 1921. Receiving much notoriety, in 1919 he published his novel "Clate," which was about a clerk in an office worker who, while serving in the army, begins to realize that the imperialist war was a crime. He returned to France and joined the French Communist Party in 1923, before traveling back to the Soviet Union. In 1921 he wrote the "Esperantist Worker" for "Esperanto", the publication for a left-wing writers' group, and served as the group's honorary president for a time. This followed with him publishing even more political novels, "Chains" in 1924 and "The Judas of Jesus" in 1927. He became the editor of the Communist Party's daily newspaper "L'Humanité" in 1926. Barbusse traveled to the Soviet Union in 1927 as an invited guest for the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. In 1928 he started the French weekly communist paper "Monde," which he edited until his death. In 1932 he led the World Congress Against Imperialist War in Amsterdam. In 1935 he wrote "Stalin; A New World Seen Through One Man." While writing another biography of Stalin, he was diagnosed with pneumonia coupled with his pulmonary war injury and dying in the Soviet Union. His remains were repatriated to Paris for burial with thousands of mourners arranged to attend his funeral as a political gesture. The workers of the Soviet Union provided him with an upright grave marker made from stone from Ural Mountains of Russia, which was decorated on the front side with the bronze disc of the author's profile in black marble and red jasper. The next year during the start of the Spanish Civil War, the Henri Barbusse Battalion was formed in his honor as a French International unit. With ponds with swans, walking paths among manicured gardens, a tennis court, ice skating ring, and two children's playgrounds, Pac Henri Barbusse is a 10.3-square acre park located in Île-de-France, outside of Paris. To the end of his life, Barbusse would maintain that the Russian Revolution represented a major and indelible step forward in the history of the liberation of humanity. His "Under Fire" has been ranked with such classics as "A Farewell to Arms" and "All Quiet on the Western Front" as one of the most powerful, realistic portrayals of the horrors of war and was translated, like most of his books, into many languages including English