Journals, Vol. 3: 1928-1939

by André Gide, Justin O'Brien

Beginning with a single entry for the year 1889, when he was twenty, and continuing intermittently but indefatigably through his life, the Journals of André Gide constitute an enlightening, moving, and endlessly fascinating chronicle of creative energy and conviction. Astutely and thoroughly annotated by Justin O'Brien in consultation with Gide himself, this translation is the definitive edition of Gide's complete journals.Devoid of affectation, alternately overtaken by depression and animated by a sense of urgency and hunger for literature and beauty, Gide read voraciously, corresponded voluminously, and thought profoundly, always questioning and doubting in search of the unadulterated truth. "The only drama that really interests me and that I should always be willing to depict anew," he wrote, "is the debate of the individual with whatever keeps him from being authentic, with whatever is opposed to his integrity, to his integration. Most often the obstacle is within him. And all the rest is merely accidental."The complete journals, representing sixty years of a varied life, testify to a disciplined intelligence in a constantly maturing thought. These pages contain aesthetic appreciations, philosophic reflections, sustained literary criticism, notes for the composition of his works, details of his personal life and spiritual conflicts, accounts of his extensive travels, and comments on the political and social events of the day, from the Dreyfus case to the German occupation. Gide records his progress as a writer and a reader as well as his contacts and conversations with the bright lights of contemporary Europe, from Paul Valéry, Paul Claudel, Léon Blum, and Auguste Rodin to Marcel Proust, Stephen Mallarmé, Oscar Wilde, and Nadia Boulanger.About theAndré Gide (1869-1951) wrote The Counterfeiters , several brief works of fiction including Strait Is the Gate and The Immoralist , a number of plays, and literary criticism. In 1947 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature and in 1950 was made an Honorary Corresponding Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Justin O'Brien is the author of Portrait of André Gide and the translator of many books including Gide's Madeleine . Richard Howard, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and a professor of writing at Columbia University, has published more than 150 translations from the French, including works by Gide, Cocteau, Camus, De Beauvoir, Barthes, Stendhal, and Baudelaire.

480 pages, Paperback

First published October 12, 2000

About the author

Diaries and novels, such as The Immoralist (1902) and Lafcadio's Adventures (1914), of noted French writer André Gide examine alienation and the drive for individuality in an often disapproving society; he won the Nobel Prize of 1947 for literature.

André Paul Guillaume Gide authored books. From beginnings in the symbolist movement, career of Gide ranged to anticolonialism between the two World Wars.

Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide exposes the conflict and eventual reconciliation to public view between the two sides of his personality; a straight-laced education and a narrow social moralism split apart these sides. One can see work of Gide as an investigation of freedom and empowerment in the face of moralistic and puritan constraints, and it gravitates around his continuous effort to achieve intellectual honesty. His self-exploratory texts reflect his search of full self, even to the point of owning sexual nature without betraying values at the same time. After his voyage of 1936 to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the same ethos informs his political activity, as his repudiation of Communism suggests.

Chinese 安德烈·纪德

Reviews

[Jay Cardam · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a reread for me. I fell in love with the journals back in my college days and have grazed over them in bits and pieces for years. Now 40 years later I re-read in order to see if my top list of books over my reading life still deserve those spots. Gide's Journals do.

[Lisa]

I liked this journal quite a bit. I am missing the last decade.