One of the most important writers of the twentieth century, André Gide also led what was probably one of the most interesting lives our century has seen. Gide knew and corresponded with many of the major literary figures of his day, from Mallarmé to Oscar Wilde. Though a Communist, his critical account of Soviet Russia in Return from the USSR earned him the enmity of the Left. A lifelong advocate of moral and political freedom and justice, he was a proscribed writer on the Vatican’s infamous “Index.” Self-published most of his life, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947, at the age of 77. An avowed homosexual, he nonetheless married his cousin, and though their marriage was unconsummated, at 53 he fathered a daughter for a friend. Alan Sheridan’s book is a literary biography of Gide, an intimate portrait of the reluctantly public man, whose work was deeply and inextricably entangled with his life. Gide’s life provides a unique perspective on our century, an idea of what it was like for one person to live through unprecedented technological change, economic growth and collapse, the rise of socialism and fascism, two world wars, a new concern for the colonial peoples and for women, and the astonishing hold of Rome and Moscow over intellectuals. Following Gide from his first forays among the Symbolists through his sexual and political awakenings to his worldwide fame as a writer, sage, and commentator on his age, Sheridan richly conveys the drama of a remarkable life; the depth, breadth, and vitality of an incomparable oeuvre; and the spirit of a time that both so aptly expressed. “[ André Gide ] far surpasses earlier biographies… The time was ripe to demonstrate Gide’s intellectual legacy: to show how, in a career that bridged two centuries, the ground was laid for the subversive strategies of the nouveau roman and for the all-out war waged by ideologues such as Sartre and Foucault against ‘patriarchal’ institutions, above all the family… Alan Sheridan is an eloquent and perceptive writer… The book has many virtues, not least of them being Sheridan’s ability to weave brief and penetrating essays on Gide’s work into the chronicle of his restless days.” ― Frederick Brown , New Republic “Proves to be the best book on Gide I know… Certainly Sheridan’s is the first book anyone interested in this author should consult after reading Gide’s own work and―in the case of certain precariously ‘sincere’ Gidean texts, such as ‘Corydon’―even before… Sensible and sympathetic, as well as powerful and politic.” ― Richard Howard , Los Angeles Times “In his biography of Gide, Alan Sheridan has accomplished a magnificent feat. Whereas other biographers have been brought up short by the daunting intricacies of Gide’s life, Sheridan does not shrink from recounting the full range of his subject’s sexual escapades, musical knowledge, friendships, vexed marriage, Protestantism, affluence, and literary merits. Without interpreting the raw materials of Gide’s life in a tendentious way, Sheridan shapes facts into coherent patterns. This is a biography worthily in the manner of Plutarch; the density of incidence never overwhelms the clarity of presentation.” ― Allan Hepburn , Boston Book Review “Paradoxically, it was left to an Englishman, Alan Sheridan, to write the first full-scale life of Gide. Sheridan has the credentials for the job―the mastery of two languages; the grasp of political and cultural as well as literary history; the patience; the sympathy; the sheer industry. He has assimilated all this material and handles it with easy familiarity, taste, and wit… He writes with insight about the life, the works, and their interconnections, and he can suddenly cut straight to the marrow… Sheridan has no ax to grind, no theory to impose; he allows us to share the pleasure he takes in Gide’s company.” ― Richard Dyer , Boston Globe “ André Gide is a remarkable achievement. To portray adequately Gide’s place in literary history is already an impressive feat… Sheridan guides his reader through Gide’s varied literary output as well. He provides excellent accounts of the social and political activities Gide became involved in. Most important, Sheridan provides a frank and sympathetic account of Gide’s personal life, as paradoxical as his public one.” ― Michael Lucey , San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle “[A] detailed and comprehensive biography of the great French and Nobel Prize–winning author of the Journals and The Counterfeiters … The biography moves chronologically―at the top of each recto page the reader can find out what year he’s in―and we read what Gide does: the people he meets, the books he reads, what’s on his mind, where he travels and by what means. It’s as though we’re living his life in the order that he lived and experienced it.” ― Stephen Goode , Washington Times “An excellent new study… Reading Sheridan’s biography gives some of the same pleasure you get from reading Gide’s Journals , whic