After Maurice Renard, the French writer who most characterized the pre-World War II period, and one of the few original voices of that time, was engineer Jacques Spitz (1896–1963). Spitz's novels were generally dark and pessimistic; they also contained some fierce satirical observations and were always extremely well documented, contrasting the realistic attention brought to the description of the details of everyday's life with the outlandishness of their events. In term of literary influences, Spitz had come out of surrealism, as evidenced by his first novels, La Croisière Indécise [The Indecisive Cruise] (1926) and Le Vent du Monde [The Wind Of The World] (1928). His genre career began with L'Agonie du Globe [The Agony Of The Globe] (1935), in which Earth was bissected into two hemispheres, one of which eventually crashed into the Moon. The novel established the use of realistic details that became characteristic of Spitz's style. Les Évadés de l'An 4000 [The Escapees From Year 4000] (1936) told of a new ice age which drove men underground, the ensuing scientific dictature and finally, an escape towards Venus. La Guerre des Mouches [The War Of The Flies] (1938) featured the conquest of Earth by mutated flies animated by a gestalt intelligence. In L'Homme Élastique [The Elastic Man] (1938), a means to compress and decompress atoms was found, enabling the creation of tiny super-soldiers and flaccid giants.   novels: The Eye of Purgatory (+ Dr. Mops' Experiment) (2010)