This abstract is provided by the publisher.
One of the most important writers of the twentieth century, André Gide also led what was probably one of the most interesting lives our century has seen. Gide knew and corresponded with many of the major literary figures of his day, from Mallarmé to Oscar Wilde. Though a Communist, his critical account of Soviet Russia in Return from the USSR earned him the enmity of the Left. A lifelong advocate or moral and political freedom and justice, he was proscribed writer on the Vatican's famous “index.” Self-published most of his life, he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1947, at the age of 77. An avowed homosexual, he nonetheless married his cousin, and though their marriage was unconsummated, at 53 he fathered a daughter for a friend.
André Gide: A Life in the Present is the only life an times literary biography of the extraordinary André Gide (1869-1951). Alan Sheridan chronicles Gide's great sexual awakening in Algiers that led to Les Nourritures Terrestres (1897); Gide's intense, early love affair with future film director Marc Allégret; his ongoing association with the literary monthly La Nouvelle Revue Francaise, which he helped fond in 1909; his vilification by the Right for his outspokenness on homosexuality and the merits of Communism, and by the Left for his critique of the Soviets; and his eventual vindication by the Nobel Prize committee and the millions of readers and scholars who have made him a part of the Western canon.
Alan Sheridan's new book, André Gide: A Life in the Present, is a literary biography of Gide, an intimate portrait of the reluctantly public man whose work was deeply and inextricable entangled with his life. Gide's life provides a unique perspective on our century, an idea of what it was like for one person to live through unprecedented technological change, economic growth and collapse, the rise of socialism and fascism, two world wars, a new concern for the colonial peoples and for women, and the astonishing hold of Rome and Moscow over intellectuals. Following Gide from his first forays among the Symbolist through his sexual and political awakenings to his worldwide fame as a writer, sage, and commentator on his age, Sheridan richly conveys the drama of a remarkable life; the depth, breadth, and vitality of an incomparable oeuvre; and the spirit of a time that both so aptly expressed.
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