André Gide

André Paul Guillaume Gide (22 November 1869 – 19 February 1951) was a French writer who worked across many genres and subjects. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947. His career moved from an early involvement with the symbolist movement to later critiques of imperialism between the world wars. He wrote over 50 books. Upon his death, *The New York Times* called him "France's greatest contemporary man of letters" and noted that literary experts considered him the finest French writer of the century.

Gide wrote both fiction and autobiography. His work often dealt with the clash—and eventual coming together—of two sides of his personality: a strict Protestant upbringing and a transgressive, adventurous sexuality. He called himself a pederast and used his writing to examine the struggle to be fully oneself, including accepting one's sexual nature, without abandoning one's principles. His politics followed the same logic. In the early 1930s, like many intellectuals, he sympathized with Communism. But after visiting the USSR in 1936, he sided with the anti-Stalinist left. Late in life, during the 1940s, he moved toward more traditional values and rejected Communism as an idea that breaks with Christian civilization.

Gide was born in Paris on 22 November 1869 to a middle-class Protestant family. His father, Jean Paul Guillaume Gide, was a law professor at the University of Paris; he died in 1880, when André was 11. His mother was Juliette Maria Rondeaux. His uncle was the political economist Charles Gide. The family on his father's side traced its roots to Italy. The ancestral Guidos had moved to France and other parts of western and northern Europe after converting to Protestantism in the 16th century and facing persecution in Catholic Italy. Gide grew up in isolated conditions in Normandy. He became a prolific writer early, publishing his first novel, *The Notebooks of André Walter*, in 1891 at age 21. In 1893 and 1894, he traveled in North Africa, where he came to accept his homosexuality. He befriended Irish playwright Oscar Wilde in Paris, where Wilde was in exile. In 1895, the two met in Algiers. Wilde mistakenly thought he had introduced Gide to homosexuality, but Gide had already come to terms with his desires.

In 1895, after his mother died, Gide married his cousin Madeleine Rondeaux. The marriage was never consummated. In 1896, he was elected mayor of La Roque-Baignard, a commune in Normandy. He spent the summer of 1907 in Jersey with friends Jacques Copeau and Théo van Rysselberghe and their families, renting a room in La Valeuse Cottage in St Brelade. There he worked on the second chapter of *Strait Is the Gate*, and van Rysselberghe painted his portrait. In 1908, Gide helped found the literary magazine *Nouvelle Revue Française*. During World War I, he visited England. One friend there was artist William Rothenstein, who later wrote about Gide's stay at his Gloucestershire home. Rothenstein described Gide as having a half-satanic, half-monk-like appearance, reminiscent of portraits of Baudelaire, and noted his exotic style—a red waistcoat, black velvet jacket, beige trousers, and a loosely knotted scarf instead of a collar and tie. Rothenstein also remarked that Gide understood art profoundly and that the heart of man held no secrets for him; Gide suffered, as Rothenstein did, from the banishment of truth during the war, refusing to see the Germans as all black or the Allies as all white.

Around 1916, when Gide was about 47, he took Marc Allégret, age 15, as a lover. Marc was one of five children of Élie Allégret, who had been Gide's tutor during his school years and later best man at his wedding. After Gide fled with Marc to London, his wife Madeleine burned all his correspondence in retaliation—"the best part of myself," Gide later said. In 1918, Gide met and befriended Dorothy Bussy; they remained friends for more than 30 years, and she translated many of his works into English. He also became close with critic Charles Du Bos. Together they worked for the Foyer Franco-Belge, helping Franco-Belgian refugees who arrived in Paris after the 1914 German invasion of Belgium. Their friendship later soured because Du Bos felt Gide had betrayed his spiritual faith, while Du Bos himself had returned to faith. Du Bos's 1929 essay *Dialogue avec André Gide*, informed by his Catholic convictions, condemned Gide's homosexuality. Their mutual friend Ernst Robert Curtius criticized the essay in a letter to Gide, saying that judging Gide by Catholic morals made the indictment irrelevant to anyone who did not already share those beliefs. In the 1920s, Gide became an inspiration for writers like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1923, he published a book on Fyodor Dostoyevsky.