André Gide

Gide was born in Paris on 22 November 1869 into a middle-class Protestant family. His father Jean Paul Guillaume Gide was a professor of law at University of Paris; he died in 1880, when the boy was 11 years old. His mother was Juliette Maria Rondeaux. His uncle was political economist Charles Gide. His paternal family traced its roots to Italy. The ancestral Guidos had moved to France and other western and northern European countries after converting to Protestantism during the 16th century and facing persecution in Catholic Italy. Gide was brought up in isolated conditions in Normandy. He became a prolific writer at an early age, publishing his first novel, The Notebooks of André Walter (French: ''Les Cahiers d'André Walter''), in 1891, at the age of 21. In 1893 and 1894, Gide travelled in Northern Africa. There he came to accept his homosexuality. Gide befriended Irish playwright Oscar Wilde in Paris, where the latter was in exile. In 1895 the two men met in Algiers. Wilde had the mistaken impression that he had introduced Gide to homosexuality, but Gide had already come to terms with his preferences. ==The middle years==

in 1924. (1924) In 1895, after his mother's death, Gide married his cousin Madeleine Rondeaux, but the marriage remained unconsummated. In 1896, he was elected mayor of La Roque-Baignard, a commune in Normandy. Gide spent the summer of 1907 in Jersey, with friends Jacques Copeau and Théo van Rysselberghe and their families. He rented a room in La Valeuse Cottage in St Brelade. Whilst there he worked on the second chapter of Strait Is the Gate (French: La Porte étroite), and van Rysselberghe painted his portrait. In 1908, Gide helped found the literary magazine Nouvelle Revue Française (The New French Review). During World War I, Gide visited England. One of his friends there was artist William Rothenstein. Rothenstein described Gide's visit to his Gloucestershire home in his autobiography: In 1916, Gide was about 47 years old when he took Marc Allégret, age 15, as a lover. Marc was one of five children of Élie Allégret and his wife. Gide had become friends with the senior Allégret during his own school years when Gide's mother had hired Allégret as a tutor for her son. Élie Allégret had been best man at Gide's 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 were friends for more than 30 years, and she translated many of his works into English. Gide also became close friends with the critic Charles Du Bos. Together they were part of the Foyer Franco-Belge, in which capacity they worked to find employment, food and housing for Franco-Belgian refugees who arrived in Paris after the 1914 German invasion of Belgium. Their friendship later declined due to Du Bos's perception that Gide had disavowed or betrayed his spiritual faith, in contrast to Du Bos's own return to faith. Du Bos's essay Dialogue avec André Gide was published in 1929. The essay, informed by Du Bos's Catholic convictions, condemned Gide's homosexuality. Gide and Du Bos's mutual friend Ernst Robert Curtius criticised the book in a letter to Gide, writing that the fact that Du Bos "judges you according to Catholic morals suffices to neglect his complete indictment. It can only touch those who think like him and are convinced in advance. He has abdicated his intellectual liberty." In the 1920s, Gide became an inspiration for such writers as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1923, he published a book on Fyodor Dostoyevsky. When he defended homosexuality in the public edition of Corydon (1924), he received so much condemnation that he was blocked from being nominated to the Académie Française. He later considered this his most important work. and it was very brief. Catherine was his only descendant by blood. He liked to call Elisabeth "La Dame Blanche" ("The White Lady"). Elisabeth eventually left her husband to move to Paris and manage the practical aspects of Gide's life. They had adjoining apartments in Montparnasse. She worshipped him, but evidently they no longer had a sexual relationship. In 1924, he published an autobiography, If it Die... (French: Si le grain ne meurt). The same year, he produced the first French-language editions of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. After 1925, Gide began to campaign for more humane conditions for convicted criminals. His legal wife, Madeleine Gide, died in 1938. He explored their marriage in Et nunc manet in te, his memoir of Madeleine, published in English in the United States in 1952. ==Africa==

From July 1926 to May 1927, Gide traveled through the colony of French Equatorial Africa with his lover Marc Allégret. They went to Middle Congo (now the Republic of the Congo), Ubangi-Shari (now the Central African Republic), briefly to Chad, and then to Cameroon. He kept a journal, which he published as Travels in the Congo (French: Voyage au Congo) and Return from Chad (French: Retour du Tchad). ==Political views and the Soviet Union==

During the 1930s, Gide briefly became a Communist, or more precisely, a fellow traveler (he never formally joined any Communist party), but as an individualist himself, he advocated the idea of Communist individualism. But Gide wrote that these problems could be solved by raising the cultural level of Soviet society. When Gide began preparing his manuscript for publication, the Kremlin was immediately informed about it, and soon Gide was visited by the Soviet author Ilya Ehrenburg, who said that he agreed with Gide, but asked to postpone the publication, as the Soviet Union was aiding the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Two days later, Louis Aragon delivered a letter from Jef Last asking to postpone the publication. These efforts failed, and as the book was published, Gide was condemned in the Soviet press In 1937, in response, Gide published Afterthoughts on the U. S. S. R.; earlier, Gide read Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed and met Victor Serge, who gave him more information about the Soviet Union. In Afterthoughts, Gide criticises Soviet society more directly: "Citrine, Trotsky, Mercier, Yvon, Victor Serge, Leguay, Rudolf and many others have helped me with their documentation. Everything they have taught me so far I had only suspected—it has confirmed and reinforced my fears". The main points of Afterthoughts were that the dictatorship of the proletariat became the dictatorship of Stalin, and that the privileged bureaucracy became the new ruling class, which profited by the workers' surplus labour, spending the state budget on projects like the Palace of Soviets or to raise its own standards of living, while the working class lived in extreme poverty; Gide cited the official Soviet newspapers to prove his claims. During World War II, Gide concluded that "absolute liberty destroys the individual and also society unless it be closely linked to tradition and discipline"; he rejected the revolutionary idea of Communism as breaking with traditions, writing, "if civilization depended solely on those who initiated revolutionary theories, then it would perish, since culture needs for its survival a continuous and developing tradition." In Thesee (1946), he showed that an individual may safely leave the Maze only if "he had clung tightly to the thread which linked him with the past". In 1947, he said that although civilizations rise and fall, Christian civilization may be saved from doom "if we accepted the responsibility of the sacred charge laid on us by our traditions and our past." He also said that he remained an individualist and protested against "the submersion of individual responsibility in organized authority, in that escape from freedom which is characteristic of our age." Gide contributed to the 1949 anthology The God That Failed. He could not write an essay because of his health, so the text was written by Enid Starkie, based on paraphrases of Return from the USSR, Afterthoughts, a discussion in Paris at l'Union pour la Verite in 1935, and his Journal; Gide approved the text. ==1930s and 1940s==

In 1930 Gide published a book about the Blanche Monnier case, La Séquestrée de Poitiers, changing little but the protagonists' names. Monnier was a woman kept captive by her mother for more than 25 years. In 1939, Gide became the first living author to be published in the prestigious Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. He left France for Africa in 1942 and lived in Tunis from December 1942 until it was retaken by French, British and American forces in May 1943 and he was able to travel to Algiers, where he stayed until the end of World War II. In 1947, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his comprehensive and artistically significant writings, in which human problems and conditions have been presented with a fearless love of truth and keen psychological insight". He devoted much of his last years to publishing his Journal.{{cite web ==Gide's life as a writer==

Gide's biographer Alan Sheridan summed up Gide's life as a writer and an intellectual: "Gide's fame rested ultimately, of course, on his literary works. But, unlike many writers, he was no recluse: he had a need of friendship and a genius for sustaining it." But his "capacity for love was not confined to his friends: it spilled over into a concern for others less fortunate than himself." Writings Gide's writing spans many genres. "As a master of prose narrative, occasional dramatist and translator, literary critic, letter writer, essayist, and diarist, André Gide provided twentieth-century French literature with one of its most intriguing examples of the man of letters." But as Sheridan points out, "It is the fiction that lies at the summit of Gide's work." "Here, as in the oeuvre as a whole, what strikes one first is the variety. Here, too, we see Gide's curiosity, his youthfulness, at work: a refusal to mine only one seam, to repeat successful formulas...The fiction spans the early years of Symbolism, to the "comic, more inventive, even fantastic" pieces, to the later "serious, heavily autobiographical, first-person narratives"...In France Gide was considered a great stylist in the classical sense, "with his clear, succinct, spare, deliberately, subtly phrased sentences." Gide's surviving letters run into the thousands. But it is the Journal that Sheridan calls "the pre-eminently Gidean mode of expression." "His first novel emerged from Gide's own journal, and many of the first-person narratives read more or less like journals. In Les faux-monnayeurs, Edouard's journal provides an alternative voice to the narrator's." "In 1946, when Pierre Herbert asked Gide which of his books he would choose if only one were to survive," Gide replied, "I think it would be my Journal.'" Beginning at the age of 18 or 19, Gide kept a journal of his life, and when it was first made available to the public, it ran to 1,300 pages. Struggle for values "Each volume that Gide wrote was intended to challenge itself, what had preceded it, and what could conceivably follow it. This characteristic, according to Daniel Moutote in his Cahiers de André Gide essay, is what makes Gide's work 'essentially modern': the 'perpetual renewal of the values by which one lives.'" Gide wrote in his Journal in 1930: "The only drama that really interests me and that I should always be willing to depict anew, is the debate of the individual with whatever keeps him from being authentic, with whatever is opposed to his integrity, to his integration. Most often the obstacle is within him. And all the rest is merely accidental." As a whole, "The works of André Gide reveal his passionate revolt against the restraints and conventions inherited from 19th-century France. He sought to uncover the authentic self beneath its contradictory masks." ==Sexual delinquency==

In his journal, Gide distinguishes between adult-attracted "sodomites" and boy-loving "pederasts", categorizing himself as the latter. Gide's journal documents his behavior in the company of Oscar Wilde. Gide's novel Corydon, which he considered his most important work, includes a defense of pederasty. At that time (before 1945), the age of consent for any type of sexual activity was set at 13. ==Bibliography==