Andrew Gide

(1869-1952, Paris)

Novelist, poet and Nobel Prize winner. His novels, plays and autobiographical texts are characterized by their exhaustive analysis of individual efforts towards self-realization and the use of Protestant ethical concepts. In Earthly Foods (1897) he defended the doctrine of active hedonism. From that moment on, his works were dedicated to examining the problems of individual freedom and responsibility, from different points of view. The Immoralist (1902) and The Narrow Gate (1907) are studies about individual ethical concepts in conflict with conventional morality. The Cellars of the Vatican, in which Gide ridiculed the possibility of complete personal independence, appeared in 1914 and was the first of his works attacked as anticlerical. Gide examined the problems of adolescence and middle-class families in If the Seed Does Not Die (1920) and in the popular novel about Parisian youth, The False Purses (1925). Gide's concern about individual moral responsibility led him to public office. After holding municipal posts in Normandy, he became the Ministry's special envoy for the Colonies in 1925-1926 and wrote two books in which he described the situation in the French colonies in Africa. Through these reports, Journey to the Congo (1928) and Return from Chad (1928), he intended to induce reforms to be carried out in the French colonial law that was being prepared. In the early 1930s, Gide had expressed his admiration and hopes about the -experiment- that had been carried out in the Soviet Union, but, after a trip there, he revealed his disappointment in Return from the USSR (1936 ). Many of Gide's critical studies appeared in La Nouvelle Revue Française, a literary magazine he helped found in 1909 and which became a highly influential publication in French intellectual circles. These critical essays were, above all, an analysis of the psychology of the artists.