Duras, Marguerite

Duras, Marguerite (1914-1996), French novelist, playwright, and film screenplay writer. She was born in Saigon, Indochina (now Vietnam), but moved to Paris in the early 1930s. Her first important novel, Un Barrage contre le Pacifique (1950; The Sea Wall, 1952), describes an impoverished French family in Indochina. Other novels include Moderato Cantabile (1958) and the semiautobiographical L'Amant (1984; The Lover, 1985), which was filmed in 1992. She also wrote the screenplay for the film by Alain Resnais Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959). Duras's style is described as Neo-Realist, in that her few characters and simple plots speak for themselves without many details or intrusions.