André Gide

In the France of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, André Paul Guillaume Gide moved through literature with unusual range and restless honesty. Born in Paris on 22 November 1869 and raised in a middle-class Protestant family, he became one of the central French writers of his time, producing more than 50 books across fiction, autobiography, criticism, and political reflection. By the time he received the 1947 Nobel Prize in Literature, his work had stretched from the symbolist movement of his youth to sharp criticism of imperialism between the World Wars.

Gide’s early life gave him some of the tensions that later fed his books. His father, Jean Paul Guillaume Gide, was a professor of law at the University of Paris and died when Gide was 11. His mother, Juliette Maria Rondeaux, raised him in isolated conditions in Normandy. He wrote early and steadily, publishing his first novel, The Notebooks of André Walter, in 1891, when he was 21. Travels in Northern Africa in 1893 and 1894 helped him accept his homosexuality, a subject that would become central to his lifelong effort to write truthfully about desire, conscience, and self-knowledge.

His private life was often bound tightly to his art. In 1895, after his mother’s death, Gide married his cousin Madeleine Rondeaux, though the marriage remained unconsummated. The next year he was elected mayor of La Roque-Baignard, a commune in Normandy. He moved among artists and writers, befriended Oscar Wilde in Paris, and later met him in Algiers. In 1907 he spent a summer in Jersey with Jacques Copeau and Théo van Rysselberghe, working there on the second chapter of Strait Is the Gate. In 1908 he helped found the literary magazine Nouvelle Revue Française, which became closely tied to modern French letters.

Gide’s writing returned again and again to the conflict between Protestant austerity and sexual freedom, and to the question of how a person might be fully honest without abandoning values. He described himself as a pederast, and works such as Corydon, publicly issued in 1924, defended homosexuality at a time when the response was harsh. Gide later considered Corydon his most important work, though the condemnation it drew helped block him from being nominated to the Académie Française. In the 1920s, his example mattered to younger writers including Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, and in 1923 he published a book on Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

His politics followed a similar demand for candor. Like many intellectuals, Gide was sympathetic to Communism in the early 1930s, but after his 1936 visit to the USSR he supported the anti-Stalinist left. In the 1940s, near the end of his life, he moved toward more traditional values and repudiated Communism as a break with the traditions of Christian civilization. Gide died on 19 February 1951, leaving behind a body of work shaped by argument, conscience, and the cost of self-acceptance. It is easy to hear why one of his lines still travels well: “It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”