While sympathetic to communism in the early 1930s, as were many intellectuals, he repudiated it after seeing widespread oppression during his 1936 journey to the USSR.
His political activity was shaped by the same ethos. As a self-professed pederast, he used his writing to explore his struggle to be fully oneself, including owning one's sexual nature, without betraying one's values. He worked to achieve intellectual honesty. Gide's work can be seen as an investigation of freedom and empowerment in the face of moralistic and puritanical constraints. He suggested that a strict and moralistic education had helped set these facets at odds. Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide expressed the conflict and eventual reconciliation of the two sides of his personality (characterized by a Protestant austerity and a transgressive sexual adventurousness, respectively). The author of more than 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's career ranged from his beginnings in the symbolist movement, to criticising imperialism between the two World Wars. He was awarded the 1947 Nobel Prize in Literature. Les nourritures terrestres ( The Fruits of the Earth)Īndré Paul Guillaume Gide ( French: 22 November 1869 – 19 February 1951) was a French author whose writings spanned a wide variety of styles and topics. Les faux-monnayeurs ( The Counterfeiters) La Symphonie Pastorale ( The Pastoral Symphony) Les caves du Vatican ( The Vatican Cellars sometimes published in English under the title Lafcadio's Adventures) Cimetière de Cuverville, Cuverville, Seine-Maritime
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