McCONNELL, Marie-Antoinette 1939-

PERSONAL: Born February 13, 1939, in France; married Paul H. McConnell.

ADDRESSES: Home—San Juan Capistrano, CA. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Louisiana State University Press, P.O. Box 25053, Baton Rouge, LA 70894-5053.

CAREER: Translator.

WRITINGS:

(Translator) André Rougeyron, Agents for Escape:Inside the French Resistance, 1939-1945, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1996.

SIDELIGHTS: Agents for Escape: Inside the French Resistance, 1939-1945 is Marie-Antoinette McConnell's translation of the memoir of André Rougeyron, an auto engineer and experimental race car driver who helped Allied soldiers escape the Gestapo in France during World War II. Arrested and imprisoned in a series of concentration camps, Rougeyron recounts his own flight back to France during the final violent months of the war in Europe. McConnell, who translated the memoir, is the wife the first American airmen Rougeyron rescued. Library Journal contributor Marie Marmo Mullaney felt that "Rougeyron's jaunty narrative voice and powers of description add a fresh perspective on the resistance in Normandy at the time of the D-Day landings and on conditions at Buchenwald during the final months of WW II." Rougeyron was awarded the Medal of Freedom with Bronze Palm by the United States Army, the Order of the British Empire by King George VI, and the Medaille de la Resistance and World War II Commemorative Medal by the Kingdom of Belgium. He died in 1967, having self-published the book in French soon after the war. A Publishers Weekly reviewer wrote that McConnell's translation of the work "offers continuous suspense and excitement as well as . . . a fresh perspective on the resistance in Normandy."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

periodicals

Library Journal, December, 1995, Marie Marmo Mullaney, review of Agents for Escape: Inside the French Resistance, 1939-1945, p. 128.

Publishers Weekly, October 30, 1995, review of Agents for Escape, p. 50.

online

Louisiana State University Press,http://www.lsu.edu/lsupress/ (March 31, 2003), overview of book and biographical note on translator.*