André Gide

Most of Andre Gide's richly-varied literary output has long been available to American readers. Only one aspect of his protean career has been lacking in translation: the essays, the publication of which will go far to explain why Gide holds in France such high rank as a critic. Many of the essays in Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality were provoked by events in the cultural and political world of twentieth-century France, a turbulent setting that produced a lasting literature. These essays are vintage Gide, informed by his characteristic spirit—his hard brilliance, pointed honesty, and the enduring relevance of his concerns. Readers of his Journals will be prepared for the style, intelligence, and marksmanship that Gide brings to bear in these forty-two articles on life as well as on letters. His range, as always, is broad: a long and moving memoir of his encounters with Oscar Wilde; a series of combats against reactionary nationalists and self-appointed purifiers of morals; estimates of Mallarme, Baudelaire, Proust, Gautier, and Valery, among others; letters to Jacques Riviere, Jean Cocteau, and Francis Jammes; and general essays on art, literature, the theater, and politics. Justin O'Brien, famous for his studies in modern French literature, has written that Gide is "related to La Fontaine and Racine by his essential conciseness and crystalline style, to Montaigne and Goethe by his inquiring mind which reconciled unrest and serenity, to Baudelaire by his lucid, prophetic criticism." O'Brien, who has done so much to bring contemporary French literature to America, supervised the translations in Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality, prepared several of them himself, and contributes an informative general introduction and additional commentary to preface the various sections of this major book.

André Gide's lifelong fascination with the conventions of society led naturally to a strong interest in France's judicial system. At the age of sixty Gide published Judge Not, a collection of writings detailing his experiences with the law as well as his thoughts on truth, justice, and judgment. Gide writes about his experience as a juror in several trials, including that of an arsonist, and he analyzes two famous crimes of his day: Marcel Redureau, a docile fifteen-year-old vineyard laborer who violently murdered his employer's family, and the respected Monnier family's confinement of their daughter, Blanche.

Gide, in this first English translation, defended a poet named Oscar Wilde when other poets threatened to wreck Wilde's life and attempted to show that Wilde was an honorable man. Gide's personal sketches are presented in this book that are in original form. This work was written during the prime of Oscar Wilde's life. Andr Gide (1869-1951), French writer, whose novels, plays, and autobiographical works are distinguished for their exhaustive analysis of individual efforts at self-realization and Protestant ethical concepts; together with his critical works they had a profound influence on French writing and philosophy. Gide was born November 22, 1869, in Paris into a strict Protestant family and educated at the cole Alsacienne and the Lyc e Henri IV. In his first book, Les cahiers d'Andre Walter (The Notebooks of Andre Walter, 1891), Gide described the religious and romantic idealism of an unhappy young man. He then became associated with the Symbolists, but in 1894 began to develop an individualistic approach and style. In Les nourritures terrestres (The Fruits of the Earth, 1897) 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. The Immoralist (1902; trans. 1930) and Strait Is the Gate (1909; trans. 1924) are studies of individual ethical concepts in conflict with conventional morality. The Caves of the Vatican (trans. 1927 and also published in English as Lafcadio's Adventures), in which Gide ridiculed the possibility of complete personal independence, appeared in 1914. The idyll La symphonie pastorale (The Pastoral Symphony, 1919; produced as a motion picture, 1947) dealt with love and responsibility. Gide examined the problems of middle-class families and of adolescence in If It Die (1920; trans. 1935) and in the popular novel of youth in Paris, The Counterfeiters (1926; trans. 1928). Gide's preoccupation with individual moral responsibility led him to seek public office. After filling municipal positions in Normandy (Normandie), he became a special envoy of the colonial ministry in 1925-26 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 USSR, but after a journey in the Soviet Union he reported his disillusionment in Return from the U. S. S. R. (1936; trans. 1937). Many of Gide's critical studies appeared in La Nouvelle Revue Fran aise, 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.

Gide, in this first English translation, defended a poet named Oscar Wilde when other poets threatened to wreck Wilde's life and attempted to show that Wilde was an honorable man. Gide's personal sketches are presented in this book that are in original form. This work was written during the prime of Oscar Wilde's life. Andr Gide (1869-1951), French writer, whose novels, plays, and autobiographical works are distinguished for their exhaustive analysis of individual efforts at self-realization and Protestant ethical concepts; together with his critical works they had a profound influence on French writing and philosophy. Gide was born November 22, 1869, in Paris into a strict Protestant family and educated at the cole Alsacienne and the Lyc e Henri IV. In his first book, Les cahiers d'Andre Walter (The Notebooks of Andre Walter, 1891), Gide described the religious and romantic idealism of an unhappy young man. He then became associated with the Symbolists, but in 1894 began to develop an individualistic approach and style. In Les nourritures terrestres (The Fruits of the Earth, 1897) 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. The Immoralist (1902; trans. 1930) and Strait Is the Gate (1909; trans. 1924) are studies of individual ethical concepts in conflict with conventional morality. The Caves of the Vatican (trans. 1927 and also published in English as Lafcadio's Adventures), in which Gide ridiculed the possibility of complete personal independence, appeared in 1914. The idyll La symphonie pastorale (The Pastoral Symphony, 1919; produced as a motion picture, 1947) dealt with love and responsibility. Gide examined the problems of middle-class families and of adolescence in If It Die (1920; trans. 1935) and in the popular novel of youth in Paris, The Counterfeiters (1926; trans. 1928). Gide's preoccupation with individual moral responsibility led him to seek public office. After filling municipal positions in Normandy (Normandie), he became a special envoy of the colonial ministry in 1925-26 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 USSR, but after a journey in the Soviet Union he reported his disillusionment in Return from the U. S. S. R. (1936; trans. 1937). Many of Gide's critical studies appeared in La Nouvelle Revue Fran aise, 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.

1947 års nobelpristagare i litteratur, André Gide (1869-1951), förnyade med Falskmyntarna (1925, på svenska 1932) den moderna franska romanen. Boken är ett av den franska 1900-talslitteraturens centrala verk, en kritik av dåtidens litterära, ideella och sociala falskmynteri som inte förlorat sin aktualitet i idé- och samhällsdebatten. Romanen har kallats »världslitteraturens första anti-roman» eftersom författaren bryter sönder den gängse litterära formen och skapar en roman i romanen. Därigenom får personerna en dubbelbelysning som är eggande och mångtydig och tjänar att göra dem ännu mer levande. Pressröster: "Äntligen i nyutgåva, en av 1900-talets mest inflytelserika romaner, Falskmyntarna (1925), "metaromanens" moder." Mats Gellerfelt, "Bäst just nu - veckans val" i Svenska Dagbladet den 12/5 2006

One of Andre Gide's best-known works, "The Immoralist (written in 1901, published in 1902) concerns the unhappy consequences of amoral hedonism, telling the story of a man who travels through Europe and North Africa and attempts to transcend the limitations of conventional morality by surrendering to his appetites. Notable for its fusion of autobiographical elements with both biblical and classical symbolism, this work marks a decided shift in Gide's prose style from a somewhat decadent floweriness to his later classic clarity. The author's nobility and simplicity of style is skillfully retained in this translation, which also preserves the passion and intensity of the original. Translation by Stanley Applebaum. Introduction.

Passing with cinematographic speed across the capitals of Europe, Nobel laureate Andr Gide's Lafcadio's Adventures is a brilliantly sly satire and one of the clearest articulations of his greatest theme: the unmotivated crime. When Lafcadio Wluiki, a street-smart nineteen-year-old in 1890s Paris, learns that he's heir to an ailing French nobleman's fortune, he's seized by wanderlust. Traveling through Rome in expensive new threads, he becomes entangled in a Church extortion scandal involving an imprisoned Pope, a skittish purveyor of graveyard statuary, an atheist-turned-believer on the edge of insolvency, and all manner of wastrels, swindlers, aristocrats, adventurers, and pickpockets. With characteristic irony, Gide contrives a hilarious detective farce whereby the wrong man is apprehended, while the charmingly perverse Lafcadio--one of the most original creations in all modern fiction--goes free.

The author wrote this work when he was suffering from tuberculosis. Addressed to the reader, it is a hymn to the pleasures of life that Gide came so close to losing: travel, touch, hearing, smell, sight and, above all, taste.

"The humanist has four leading characteristics--curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and a belief in the human race--and all four are present in Gide. . . . The humanist of our age." --E. M. Forster A Penguin Classic In The Immoralist, Andr Gide presents the confessional account of a man seeking the truth of his own nature. The story's protagonist, Michel, knows nothing about love when he marries the gentle Marceline out of duty to his father. On the couple's honeymoon to Tunisia, Michel becomes very ill, and during his recovery he meets a young Arab boy whose radiant health and beauty captivate him. An awakening for him both sexually and morally, Michel discovers a new freedom in seeking to live according to his own desires. But, as he also discovers, freedom can be a burden. A frank defense of homosexuality and a challenge to prevailing ethical concepts, The Immoralist is a literary landmark, marked by Gide's masterful, pure, simple style. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

This is the major autobiographical statement from Nobel laureate Andr Gide. In the events and musings recorded here we find the seeds of those themes that obsessed him throughout his career and imbued his classic novels The Immoralist and The Counterfeiters. Gide led a life of uncompromising self-scrutiny, and his literary works resembled moments of that life. With If It Die, Gide determined to relay without sentiment or embellishment the circumstances of his childhood and the birth of his philosophic wanderings, and in doing so to bring it all to light. Gide's unapologetic account of his awakening homosexual desire and his portrait of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas as they indulged in debauchery in North Africa are thrilling in their frankness and alone make If It Die an essential companion to the work of a twentieth-century literary master.

A delicate boy growing up in Paris, Jerome Palissier spends many summers at his uncle's house in the Normandy countryside, where the whole world seems 'steeped in azure'. There he falls deeply in love with his cousin Alissa and she with him. But gradually Alissa becomes convinced that Jerome's love for her is endangering his soul. In the interests of his salvation, she decides to suppress everything that is beautiful in herself - in both mind and body. A devastating exploration of aestheticism taken to extremes, Strait is the Gate is a novel of haunting beauty that stimulates the mind and the emotions.

'To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one's freedom' - André Gide Michel had been a blindfold scholar until, newly married, he contracted tuberculosis. His will to recover brings self-discovery and the growing desire to rebel against his background of culture, decency and morality. But the freedom from constraints that Michel finds on his restless travels is won at great cost. And freedom itself, he finds, can be a burden. Gide's novel examines the inevitable conflicts that arise when a pleasure seeker challenges conventional society and, without moralizing, it raises complex issues involving the extent of personal responsibility.