André
Paul Guillaume Gide (1869—1951) was a French
author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947.
Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement,
to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.
Known
for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide
exposes to public view the conflict and eventual reconciliation
between the two sides of his personality, split apart by a
strait-laced education and a narrow social moralism.
Gide's
work can be seen as an investigation of freedom and empowerment
in the face of moralistic and puritan constraints, and gravitates
around his continuous effort to achieve intellectual honesty.
His self-exploratory texts reflect his search of how to be
fully oneself, even to the point of owning one's sexual nature,
without at the same time betraying one's values.
His
political activity is informed by the same ethos, as suggested
by his repudiation of communism after his 1936 voyage to the
USSR. Gide left France for Africa in 1942 and lived in Tunis
until the end of World War II. In 1947, he received the Nobel
Prize in Literature.
A
year after his death in 1951, the Roman Catholic Church placed
his works on the Index of Forbidden Books.
Source
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Wikipedia
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