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  • Published: 15 May 2001
  • ISBN: 9780375726064
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $36.99
Categories:

If It Die




This is the major autobiographical statement from Nobel laureate André Gide. In the events and musings recorded here we find the seeds of those themes that obsessed him throughout his career and imbued his classic novels The Immoralist and The Counterfeiters.

Gide led a life of uncompromising self-scrutiny, and his literary works resembled moments of that life. With If It Die, Gide determined to relay without sentiment or embellishment the circumstances of his childhood and the birth of his philosophic wanderings, and in doing so to bring it all to light. Gide’s unapologetic account of his awakening homosexual desire and his portrait of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas as they indulged in debauchery in North Africa are thrilling in their frankness and alone make If It Die an essential companion to the work of a twentieth-century literary master.

  • Published: 15 May 2001
  • ISBN: 9780375726064
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $36.99
Categories:

About the author

Andre Gide

Gide was born in Paris on 22 November 1869. He had an irregular and lonely upbringing. He became devoted to literature and music, and began his literary career as an essayist, moving on to poetry, biography, fiction, drama, criticism, reminiscence and translation. By 1917 he had emerged as a prophet to French youth, and his unorthodox views were a source of endless debate and attack. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. Gide died in Paris in 1951.

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