Pierre Hamp

(pseudonym of Henri Louis Bourillon). Born Apr. 23, 1876, in Nice; died Nov. 20, 1962. French writer and engineer.

Hamp began his writing career in 1908 with a collection of short stories entitled Ten Stories Written in the Département du Nord. His novels, Fresh Fish (1908, Russian translation 1925), Champagne (1909, Russian translation 1925), Rails (1912, Russian translation 1925), and The Victory of the Machines (1920) do not tell the story of people engaged in work but rather depict the production process itself—fetishized as the impersonal manufacturing of products in which man is reduced to functioning as an instrument, or machine, that one must know how to exploit in a civilized way for the benefit of the masters. Hamp regarded the class struggle as a source of anarchy. In the novel Wool (1931) he presented an idealized image of the capitalist organizer of production. One of the creators of the so-called industrial novel, Hamp in fact substituted dry reportage for art.