Roger Martin du Gard
Facts
Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.
Roger Martin du Gard
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1937
Born: 23 March 1881, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France
Died: 22 August 1958, Bellême, France
Residence at the time of the award: France
Prize motivation: “for the artistic power and truth with which he has depicted human conflict as well as some fundamental aspects of contemporary life in his novel-cycle Les Thibault”
Language: French
Prize share: 1/1
Life
Roger Martin du Gard was born in 1881 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. He attended two of the finest Paris lycees and graduated in 1906 writing a thesis in archaeology and with a degree as an archivist-paleographer. He attributes this training in history and scholarship to his scrupulous realism and attention to minute detail. He fought in the first world war, and he was a longtime friend of fellow Literature Laureate André Gide. Roger Martin du Gard died in 1958 in Nice, France.
Work
Roger Martin du Gard’s fiction has been linked with the realist and naturalist traditions and shows a sympathy for humanist socialism and pacifism. His first success, Jean Barois, was published in 1913, but he is best known for The Thibaults, a monumental picture of the world before the outbreak of the WWI published in twelve volumes between 1922 and 1940. The Thibaults follows the fortunes of two brothers, Antoine and Jacques Thibault, from their upbringing in a prosperous Catholic bourgeois family to the end of World War I.
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