Françoise Sagan

French writer, published and an overnight success at age 18 with "Bonjour Tristesse." She was awarded the Prix des Critiques and her first book was translated into 20 languages. Other works included, "A Certain Smile," 1956, "Those Without Shadows," 1957, "Aimez-Vous Brahms?" 1959 and "Those Wonderful Clouds," 1962. She also authored several plays as well as a ballet, a total of some 40 novels, memoirs and plays.

The youngest of three kids, she was born Françoise Quoirez: Sagan was her pen name. Her dad worked for General Electric and then ran a factory for an American company in Argentina. She was an impulsive, indulged child who took to writing as a kid. She moved to Paris in her teens and took to all-night bars, cinema, and whiskey; keeping a bottle hidden in her room.

Her first book, "Bonjour Tristesse," won the 1954 Prix des Critiques and sold more than five hundred thousand copies in its first year. Within months of the publication, Sagan joined Brigitte Bardot, Maurice Chevalier, and General de Gaulle as a representative of the spirit of the French to the rest of the world. She became friends with Francois Truffaut and Claude Chabrol, for whom she wrote the 1963 film "Landru."

Reviewers slowly lost interest in her work and journalists began to focus on the increasingly scandalous saga of her life. A daringly fast driver, Sagan accidentally drove into a ditch in 1957 and survived a subsequent three-day coma. Then came the heavy drinking and the drugs. She had become increasingly dependent on a type of morphine that was prescribed to alleviate pain. During the 1960s she aligned herself with the left politically. Her intellectual grasp of economics was never good and by the '70s and '80s her fortune declined along in pace with her reputation. The people she wrote about, once considered the "jet set," were now considered "Euro-trash." In 1990 she received a six-month suspended sentence and a ten-thousand-franc fine for possession of cocaine.