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The late Andre Gide was throughout his long life a prolific and distinguished writer in nearly all forms of belles lettres. He enjoyed singular world-wide recognition for his literary works throughout his life, including the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature. His daring innovations in forms of the novel influenced a generation of writers both in his native France and abroad. Along side his iconoclasm in seeking new modes of literary expression, he set himself the task of becoming a master of the French language. With persistent scholarly endeavor and study of the rules and the traditions of that most precise and authoritarian language, he ultimately achieved a perfection of style and lucidity. There is reflected in Andre Gide's work and his approach to his work, innovation and submission, the pattern of the writer's life.
Andre Gide never espoused a religious faith, but he was patently attracted to religion. At one period in his life he embraced the dogma of Marxism, but later rejected authoritarian Communism. His marriage would seem never to have been consummated, but he had a child out of wedlock, whom he publically acknowledged. No other literary figure — including Oscar Wilde — has in the history of the arts been so compulsive about telling the world about his homosexuality.
The journals, autobiography, novels, articles, plays, essays, and translations of the works of other writers provide an exceptional opportunity for applied psychoanalysis, for the minutiae of thoughts, fantasies, actions, and reactions — particularly in the journals — are set down over an extended period with protestant honesty and a painful candor. A parallel reading of his journals and his autobiography is most rewarding for insights into the dynamics of the personality of