André Gide
Facts
Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.
André Paul Guillaume Gide
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1947
Born: 22 November 1869, Paris, France
Died: 19 February 1951, Paris, France
Residence at the time of the award: France
Prize motivation: “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”
Language: French
Prize share: 1/1
Life
André Gide’s literary homage of freedom from conventions and morals is all about the right of Western individuals to live out their desires and impulses. As portrayed in his literature, this way of life presupposes the oppression of vulnerable groups, such as children and women in poverty, by the privileged class. It is now known that Gide sexually assaulted minors, which he describes in positive terms himself, especially in the book Corydon.
Work
André Gide was a prose writer and literary critic who translated the works of Walt Whitman, William Shakespeare and Rainer Maria Rilke into French. His wrote five collections of poems, eight plays and more than 15 prose works, of which Les Faux Monnayeurs (1926) (The Counterfeiters) stood out as experimental in form because it was a metanovel, which deals with its own creation and the conditions under which it is written.
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