According to the novelist and critic Pierre-Henri Simon, writing in 1964, the mark of a Goncourt-winning novel was that although ‘agréable à manger, il doit tout de même nourrir’ (Simon, 1964). The laureate of the 1964 Prix Goncourt was Georges Conchon. His novel, L’État sauvage, published by Albin Michel, tells the story of a French bureaucrat sent to an anonymous, newly independent, Central African city to work for UNESCO. Its realist portrayal of the first 24 hours of this visit depicts taut racism driven by a love triangle between the main protagonist, Avit, his estranged wife, Laurence, and her lover, Doumbé, an African minister in the new government. It is significant that this largely forgotten text won France's most prestigious literary prize in the early years of the independences, a prize which resulted in sales of over 200,000 copies in the first two months after it was awarded (Anon., 1968). The novel's reception, documented in three thick press files in the Albin Michel archive, demonstrates particular tensions between aesthetic and ideological criteria of literary evaluation in this period. Some critics praised what they saw as Conchon's ‘Celinian’ pessimism (Bory, 1964), while others drew comparisons with Aldous Huxley and Graham Greene (Anon., 1964a; Vuilleumier, 1964). Among the many clippings there is no mention of Sembene, Beti, Oyono, or any other African writer. Several critics praised the novel's formal properties: it was ‘bien bâti’ (Anon., 1964a), ‘lucide’ (Anon., 1964b), ‘modéré’ (Burniaux, 1964), ‘solide’ (Sion, 1964). Critics were similarly keen to mention the brief period Conchon had spent in Central Africa as a journalist and reiterate the stability of his profession as a fonctionnaire in Paris. As secrétaire des débats at the French Senate, he was partly removed from the dominant milieu of literary debate in the city, but retained a certain authority to comment on political issues. By addressing issues of decolonization and racism through a conventionally realist literary style, Conchon's text and its reception provide a useful barometer for the post-independence literary field.

In the 1960s, literary responses to current affairs in West and Central Africa in French began gradually to work against the realism that dominated the late 1950s.