André Gide

André Gide (1869–1951) was a French writer, critic and moralist, one of the most important and most investigated literary figures of the twentieth century. Works such as the taut first-person novel L'Immoraliste (The Immoralist), the austere sorrow of Strait is the Gate and his great Journals probed the conflicts between desire, duty, Protestant morality and the free life, and won him the 1947 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Gide attacked convention with a candour that scandalised and renewed French letters. Founder with others of the influential Nouvelle Revue Française, he led a public turn to anticolonialism and communism (then away from it) and championed such younger writers as Camus. His own autobiography If It Die remains a masterpiece of confession.