Daniel Anselme was born Daniel Rabinovitch in 1927, and adopted the name Anselme while serving in the French Resistance with his father. Anselme traveled widely as a journalist, and was known as a raconteur and a habitué of Left Bank cafés. A vocal protester of France’s war with Algeria, he addressed the war in On Leave (1957), his first novel. Anselme published a second novel, Relations, in 1964; ran the journal Les Cahiers de Mai from 1968 to 1974; and was one of the leaders of Solidarity Radio in Paris in 1981–82. He published a semiautobiographical account of his wartime experiences called The Secret Companion in 1984, and died five years later in Paris.