Louis Paul Boon in the New Era of Television in the 1960s

Belgium’s Nobel Prize candidate for Literature, Louis Paul Boon (1912–1979), regularly appeared on prime time television in the early and mid-sixties. His national fame reached a peak in the 1960s and 1970s. His funeral in 1979 was a national event. This article investigates the turn in appreciation for Boon in the 1960s and the impact television has had on it. The approach draws on literary studies as well as television and media studies in that it approaches the 1960s as a decade in which public life was profoundly changed by the new mass medium which, after a slow start in Belgium, had an impact on public life from the early 1960s onwards, as in most other Western countries. The article examines why and how a turn in appreciation for Boon came about in the 1960s and which role television played in it

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