Gide

André Paul Guillaume Gide (22 November 1869 – 19 February 1951) was a French author whose works covered a broad range of styles and subjects. He received the 1947 Nobel Prize in Literature. Gide's career began with the symbolist movement and later included critiques of imperialism between the two World Wars. The author of over fifty books, he was described in his obituary in *The New York Times* as "France's greatest contemporary man of letters" and "judged the greatest French writer of this century by the literary cognoscenti."

Gide is known for both his fiction and his autobiographical writing, in which he explored the tension and eventual reconciliation between two sides of his personality—marked by Protestant austerity and transgressive sexual adventurousness. He believed that a strict and moralistic upbringing contributed to this internal conflict. His writing can be seen as an exploration of freedom and empowerment in the face of moralistic and puritanical constraints. He sought intellectual honesty. As a self-identified pederast, he used his writing to examine his struggle to be true to himself, including embracing his sexual nature without compromising his values. His political views were similarly shaped by this ethos. While sympathetic to Communism in the early 1930s, like many intellectuals, after his 1936 trip to the USSR he supported the anti-Stalinist left; during the 1940s, he moved toward more traditional values and rejected Communism as an idea that diverged from the traditions of Christian civilization.