André Gide (1869 - 1951) was a French novelist, essayist, dramatist and diarist who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947. [1] [2] Across more than fifty years he explored moral freedom, self-deception and the tension between desire and conscience, and helped found the Nouvelle Revue Française, the most influential French literary review of the twentieth century. [3]
Early life and education
Gide was born in Paris on 22 November 1869 into a wealthy Protestant family; his father, a professor of law, died when Gide was eleven, leaving him to a strict upbringing by his mother. [1] He was educated at the École alsacienne and the Lycée Henri-IV, though frequent illness interrupted his schooling and much of his early learning was private.
His first book, Les Cahiers d'André Walter, appeared anonymously in 1891 and brought him into Symbolist circles around Stéphane Mallarmé. [2] A journey to North Africa in 1893 and 1894 proved decisive, both for his health and for his recognition of his homosexuality, and it loosened the hold of the austere religious formation of his youth.
Major works
Les Nourritures terrestres (1897) celebrated sensual availability and the refusal of fixed doctrine, and became a manifesto for a later generation of readers. [2] L'Immoraliste (1902) and La Porte étroite (1909) form a deliberate pair, the first tracing a man's pursuit of self-realisation at the expense of his wife, the second a woman's renunciation of earthly love for a punishing ideal of sanctity.
His most ambitious novel, Les Faux-Monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters, 1926), abandoned linear narration for a structure of overlapping plots and included a novelist character composing the book the reader is holding. [3] Gide published his working notes for it separately, an early instance of a writer documenting a novel's construction. He also wrote the tale Les Caves du Vatican, the confessional memoir Si le grain ne meurt, and Corydon, a set of dialogues defending homosexuality that drew hostility when published under his name in 1924.
Public engagement
In 1909 Gide was among the founders of the Nouvelle Revue Française, which shaped French literary taste for decades and grew into the publishing house Gallimard. [3] He campaigned against abuses in French colonial Africa after travelling in the Congo and Chad in the mid-1920s, publishing Voyage au Congo, whose account of forced labour by concession companies prompted parliamentary debate. [1]
Attracted to communism in the early 1930s, he visited the Soviet Union in 1936 and published Retour de l'URSS, a sharply critical report on conformity and repression there that cost him many of his political allies. [2] He spent much of the Second World War in North Africa.
Later years and legacy
Gide was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947 "for his comprehensive and artistically significant writings, in which human problems and conditions have been presented with a fearless love of truth and keen psychological insight". [4] He died in Paris on 19 February 1951.
His Journal, kept from 1889 until shortly before his death and published in full afterwards, is regarded as a major work in its own right and an unusually candid record of a literary life. [1] The Roman Catholic Church placed his writings on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1952, a measure of the controversy he continued to provoke. His influence on the French novel, and on later writers concerned with moral authenticity, remains substantial. [2]
