André Gide Books In Order

Novels

  1. Notebooks of Andre Walter (1891)
  2. Urien’s Voyage (1893)
  3. The Immoralist (1902)
  4. Strait Is the Gate (1909)
  5. Lafcadio’s Adventures (1914)
  6. La Symphonie Pastorale (1919)
  7. The School for Wives (1929)
  8. The Counterfeiters (1950)
  9. Madeleine (1951)
  10. The Vatican Cellars (1952)
  11. Marshlands (1953)
  12. The White Notebook (1967)

Collections

  1. Imaginary Interviews (1944)
  2. Oedipus, and Theseus (1950)
  3. Two Symphonies (1963)
  4. The Andre Gide Reader (1971)

Plays

  1. Judge Not (1931)
  2. The Trial (1950)

Novellas

  1. Isabelle (1911)

Non fiction

  1. Pretexts (1903)
  2. Amyntas (1906)
  3. Corydon (1920)
  4. Dostoevsky (1923)
  5. Travels in the Congo (1927)
  6. Return from the USSR (1936)
  7. Notes on Chopin (1938)
  8. The Journals of Andre Gide (1939)
  9. If It Die (1950)
  10. The Correspondence of Andre Gide and Edmund Gosse, 1904-1928 (1960)
  11. Selected Letters of Andre Gide and Dorothy Bussy (1983)

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André Gide Books Overview

Urien’s Voyage

An important early work by a key French thinker, Urien’s Voyage is a fantastic allegorical account of a journey to the Arctic. From the stagnant teeming waters of the Sargasso to the frozen north, Gide charts in sensual, sumptuous prose the marvellous journey of the Orion and the sexual and moral transformations of its crew. Largely overlooked on its first UK publication in 1964, Urien’s Voyage is now regarded as a key work, articulating the powerful tension between sexuality and morality that would preoccupy its author in all his writing to come.

The Immoralist

In The Immoralist, Andr Gide presents the confessional account of a man seeking the truth of his own nature. The story’s protagonist, Michel, knows nothing about love when he marries the gentle Marceline out of duty to his father. On the couple’s honeymoon to Tunisia, Michel becomes very ill, and during his recovery he meets a young Arab boy whose radiant health and beauty captivate him. An awakening for him both sexually and morally, Michel discovers a new freedom in seeking to live according to his own desires. But, as he also discovers, freedom can be a burden. A frank defense of homosexuality and a challenge to prevailing ethical concepts, The Immoralist is a literary landmark, marked by Gide’s masterful, pure, simple style. Translated by David Watson, with an introduction by Alan Sheridan.

Strait Is the Gate

Strait Is the Gate‘, first published in 1909 in France as ‘La Porte etroite’, is a novel about the failure of love in the face of the narrowness of the moral philosophy of Protestantism. Andr Gide 1869 1951 was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide’s career spanned from the symbolist movement to the advent of anticolonialism in between the two World Wars. Gide’s work can be seen as an investigation of freedom and empowerment in the face of moralistic and puritan constraints, and gravitates around his continuous effort to achieve intellectual honesty. His self exploratory texts reflect his search of how to be fully oneself, without at the same time betraying one’s values…
‘For Gide was very different from the picture most people had of him. He was the very reverse of an aesthete, and, as a writer, had nothing in common with the doctrine of art for art’s sake. He was a man deeply involved in a specific struggle, a specific fight, who never wrote a line which he did not think was of service to the cause he had at heart.’ Francois Mauriac

Lafcadio’s Adventures

1925. French writer, humanist, and moralist who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947. Gide’s search for self, the underlying theme of his several works, remained essentially religious. Throughout his career Gide used his writings to examine moral questions. He is as well known for his influence as a moralist and a thinker as for his contributions to literature. Lafcadio Wluiki is one of the original creations in modern fiction. Gide’s preoccupation with the gratuitous action, the unmotivated crime it has a place in more than one of his books here receives its most extended treatment, and Lafcadio is the instrument. With characteristic irony, Gide leads the police to a solution wherein the wrong man is apprehended and punished for the crime, while the charmingly perverse Lafcadio goes free. The action pas*ses with cinematographic speed, chiefly in the capitals of Europe. The actors, other than Lafcadio, are noblemen, saints, adventurers and pickpockets. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.

La Symphonie Pastorale

In beautiful, evocative prose, Gide’s short novel explores such themes as love, blindness, honor, and mortality.

The Counterfeiters

‘It’s only after our death that we shall really be able to hear’. The measured tone of hopeless nihilism that pervades ‘The Counterfeiters‘ quickly shatters any image of Andre Gide as the querulous and impious Buddha to a quarter century of intellectuals. In sharp and brilliant prose a seedy, cynical and gratuitously alarming narrative is developed, involving a wide range of otherwise harmless and mainly middle to upper class Parisians. But the setting could be anywhere. From puberty through adolescence to death, ‘The Counterfeiters‘ is a rare encyclopedia of human disorder, weakness and despair.

Madeleine

Madeleine is the story of a great writer’s marriage, a deeply disturbing account of Andr Gide s feelings towards his beloved and long suffering wife. It was a relationship which Gide exalted he termed it the central drama of his existence yet deliberately shrouded in mystery. This was no ordinary marriage. Madeleine Rondeaux, two years older than her cousin Andr Gide, became his wife after Gide s first visit to Algeria. In his Journal, Gide refers to her as Emmanu le or as Em. Only in this book, published a few months after his death, does Gide call her by her real name and painfully reveal the nature of their life together. All of Gide s vast work may be viewed as a confession, impelled by his need to write what he believed to be true about himself. In Madeleine this act of confession reaches a crowning point. It is a complex tale by a complex man about a complex relationship. Ranks among the masterpieces of Gide s vibrating prose. It is also the most tragic personal document to have emanated from Gide s pen. New York Times.

Two Symphonies

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Hesperides Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Judge Not

Andr Gide’s lifelong fascination with the conventions of society led naturally to a strong interest in France’s judicial system. At the age of sixty Gide published Judge Not, a collection of writings detailing his experiences with the law as well as his thoughts on truth, justice, and judgment. Gide writes about his experience as a juror in several trials, including that of an arsonist, and he analyzes two famous crimes of his day: Marcel Redureau, a docile fifteen year old vineyard laborer who violently murdered his employer’s family, and the respected Monnier family’s confinement of their daughter, Blanche.

The Trial

Three great names join here to create a unique play: the genius of Franz Kafka and Andre Gide, the two masters of modern European literature, combines with that of Jean Louis Barrault, one of the most vital forces in European theater. Out of this rare collaboration has come a dramatic work that is eminently readable and at the same time suitable for staging.

Pretexts

Most of Andre Gide’s richly-varied literary output has long been available to American readers. Only one aspect of his protean career has been lacking in translation: the essays, the publication of which will go far to explain why Gide holds in France such high rank as a critic. Many of the essays in Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality were provoked by events in the cultural and political world of twentieth-century France, a turbulent setting that produced a lasting literature. These essays are vintage Gide, informed by his characteristic spirit-his hard brilliance, pointed honesty, and the enduring relevance of his concerns.

Readers of his Journals will be prepared for the style, intelligence, and marksmanship that Gide brings to bear in these forty-two articles on life as well as on letters. His range, as always, is broad: a long and moving memoir of his encounters with Oscar Wilde; a series of combats against reactionary nationalists and self-appointed purifiers of morals; estimates of Mallarme, Baudelaire, Proust, Gautier, and Valery, among others; letters to Jacques Riviere, Jean Cocteau, and Francis Jammes; and general essays on art, literature, the theater, and politics.

Justin O’Brien, famous for his studies in modern French literature, has written that Gide is ‘related to La Fontaine and Racine by his essential conciseness and crystalline style, to Montaigne and Goethe by his inquiring mind which reconciled unrest and serenity, to Baudelaire by his lucid, prophetic criticism.’ O’Brien, who has done so much to bring contemporary French literature to America, supervised the translations in Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality, prepared several of them himself, and contributes an informative general introduction and additional commentary to preface the various sections of this major book.

Andre Gide 1869-1951 was a French author who won the Nobel Prie in Literature in 1947. He began his writings at the start of the symbolist movement and was most widely known for his fictional and autobiographical works. Among his best-known works are The Counterfeiters, The Immoralist, Lafcadio’s Adventures, Strait Is the Gate, and the Journals.

Justin O’Brien 1906-1969 was an author famous for his studies in modern French literature. Some of his works include Portrait of Andre Gide, The French Literary Horion, and Literature to Us.

Amyntas

Translated from the French by Richard Howard

Corydon

Considered by Gide to be the most important of his books, this slim, exquisitely crafted volume consists of four dialogues on the subject of homosexuality and its place in society. Published anonymously in bits and pieces between 1911 and 1920, ‘Corydon‘ first appeared in a signed, commercial edition in France in 1924 and in the United States in 1950, the year before Gide’s death. This present edition features the impeccable translation of the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Richard Howard. In spirited dialogue with his bigoted, boorish interviewer, ‘Corydon‘ marshals evidence from naturalists, historians, poets, and philosophers to support his contention that homosexuality pervaded the most culturally and artistically advanced civilizations, from Greece in the age of Pericles to Renaissance Italy and England in the age of Shakespeare. Although obscured by later critics, literature and art from Homer to Titian proclaim the true nature of relationships between such lovers as Achilles and Patrocles not to mention Virgil’s mythical ‘Corydon‘ and his shepherd, Alexis. The evidence, ‘Corydon‘ suggests, points to heterosexuality as a socially constructed union, while the more fundamental, natural relation is the homosexual one. ‘My friends insist that this little book is of the kind which will do me the greatest harm’, Gide wrote of his ‘Corydon‘. In these pages, contemporary readers will find a prescient and courageous treatment of a topic that has scarcely become less controversial.

The Journals of Andre Gide

Beginning with a single entry for the year 1889, when he was twenty, and continuing intermittently but indefatigably through his life, The Journals of Andre 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. 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 Valry, Paul Claudel, Lon Blum, and Auguste Rodin to Marcel Proust, Stephen Mallarm, Oscar Wilde, and Nadia Boulanger. 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’.

If It Die

This is the major autobiographical statement from Nobel laureate Andr 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.

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