by André Gide
“Yes, I’ve already heard about that remark; you ought to try to find it for me.”
(Theory: just like the kingdom of God, hell is within us):
“And I feel in myself, on certain days, such an overwhelming inrush of evil that I imagine the Prince of Darkness is already beginning to set up hell within me.”
ANDRÉ GIDE was born in Paris in 1869. His first literary works (he began publishing in 1891) established him as a promising addition to the symbolist group; but in 1895, after a voyage of self-discovery in North Africa, he turned to the glorification of life and liberty in works close to the spirit of Nietzsche and Whitman. With Paris and his Norman estate as headquarters, Gide spent much of his long life traveling throughout Europe and Africa while devoting himself to literary creation.
By the time The Counterfeiters appeared (1926), Gide’s reputation was solidly established on such brief fictions as Strait Is the Gate and The Immoralist, several highly original plays, and some of the most penetrating literary and philosophic criticism of the epoch.
After World War II, new works by Gide, including his celebrated Journals, continued to appear, and he remained an incredibly young spirit, a leader among those dominating twentieth-century European literature. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947. In 1950 he was made an Honorary Corresponding Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in Paris in 1951.
