Gide, André Paul Guillaume

Born Nov. 22, 1869, in Paris; died there Feb. 19, 1951. French writer. The son of a lawyer.

Gide’s first books The Poems of Andre Walter (1887), The Notebooks of Andre Walter (1891), The Treatise of the Narcissus (1891), and The Voyage ofUrien (1893) are written in the symbolist vein. In Fruits of the Earth (1897), The 1mmoralist (1902), and Strait Is the Gate (1909), Gide contrasts the Nietzschian strong personality to the trite bourgeois morality and civilization, and he praises an anarchistic rebelliousness that takes the form of amorality. In The Vatican Swindle (1914) the hero-individualists resist the grotesquely depicted bourgeois world. In The Counterfeiters (1925) the description of the decay of bourgeois society becomes an apology for amorality. The composition of the novel is complex: the characters themselves discuss its structure. Both Travels in the Congo (1927) and Return From Lake Chad (1928) contain sharp critiques of capitalism. In the mid-1930’s, Gide joined the antifascist literary movement; how-ever, his antibourgeois stand proved to be superficial; it was his asocial individualism that always prevailed. In 1936, Gide wrote an anti-Soviet pamphlet after a short visit to the USSR; during World War II he emigrated to Tunis but did not take a stand against fascism in print. In 1947 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.