André Gide

André Gide (1869-1951), French writer, whose novels, plays, and autobiographical works are distinguished for their exhaustive analysis of individual efforts at self-realization and their exploration of the conflict between hedonism and Protestant ethical concepts; together with his critical works they had a profound influence on French writing and philosophy.

Gide was born on November 22, 1869, in Paris into a strict Protestant family of substantial means. He was educated at the École Alsacienne and the Lycée Henri IV, although his schooling was much interrupted by ill health. In his first book, Les Cahiers d’André Walter (The Notebooks of André Walter, 1891), Gide described the religious and romantic idealism of an unhappy young man. He was associated briefly with the Symbolists, but in 1894 began to develop an individualistic approach and style. In Les Nourritures Terrestres (The Fruits of the Earth, 1897), written after meeting, and being encouraged by, Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas in Africa, he preached the doctrine of active hedonism. Thereafter his works were devoted to examining the problems of individual freedom and responsibility, from many points of view. L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist, 1930) and La Porte Étroite (1909; Strait Is the Gate, 1924) are studies of individual ethical concepts in conflict with conventional morality and reflect the moral dilemmas of his personal life. Les Caves du Vatican (1914; trans. 1927 and also published in English as Lafcadio’s Adventures), in which Gide ridiculed the possibility of complete personal independence, made fashionable the concept of the acte gratuit, a purely unmotivated action, and was the first of his works to be attacked for anticlericalism. The idyll La Symphonie Pastorale (The Pastoral Symphony, 1919; produced as a film, 1947) dealt with love and responsibility and the tragedy of their coming into conflict. Gide examined the problems of middle-class families and of adolescence in Si le Grain ne Meurt (1926; If It Die, 1935) and in the popular novel of youth in Paris, Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1925; The Counterfeiters, 1928). His justification of homosexuality, Corydon (1924), provoked violent criticism, even from his friends.

Gide’s preoccupation with individual moral responsibility led him to seek public office. After filling municipal positions in Normandy, he became a special envoy of the colonial ministry in 1925-1926 and wrote two books describing conditions in the French African colonies. These reports, Voyage au Congo (1927) and Retour du Tchad (1927), were instrumental in bringing about reforms in French colonial law. They were published together in English as Travels in the Congo (1929). In the early 1930s Gide had expressed his admiration and hope for the “experiment” in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but after a journey in the Soviet Union he reported his disillusionment in Retour de l’URSS (1936; trans. 1937).

Many of Gide’s critical studies appeared in La Nouvelle Revue Française, a literary periodical that he helped to found in 1909 and that became a dominant influence in French intellectual circles. These essays are principally analyses of the psychology of creative artists.

Besides writing the verse dramas Le Roi Candaule (The King Candaule) and Saül (published together in 1904, the latter having been influenced by his mother’s recent death), Gide translated Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Hamlet into French. He also made distinguished translations of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by the early 19th-century poet William Blake and of excerpts from the works of the mid-19th-century American poet Walt Whitman. The publication of Gide’s Journal (4 vols., 1939-1951), a series of literary diaries, excited worldwide critical interest. Gide received the 1947 Nobel Prize for Literature. He died on February 19, 1951, in Paris.