François Mauriac

François Mauriac was born in Bordeaux in 1885. His father died before the boy was two, and he was raised by a devout mother in a sheltered Catholic household, among the vineyards and pine forests of the Gironde and the Landes that would supply the landscape of nearly all his fiction. He studied literature at the University of Bordeaux and moved to Paris, where he briefly attended the École des Chartes; a first volume of poems, Les Mains jointes, drew the encouragement of Maurice Barrès.

His novels of the 1920s and early 1930s are compact, intense studies of the provincial propertied class, where land and money tighten around families and desire is felt as both torment and temptation. The Kiss to the Leper, The Desert of Love, Thérèse Desqueyroux — the story of a woman who tries to poison her husband — and Vipers’ Tangle, the confession of a miser consumed by hatred for his family, examine the soul in the absence of grace, while leaving open the possibility of its arrival. He was elected to the Académie française in 1933.

The Spanish Civil War moved Mauriac toward the left, and during the Occupation he joined the Resistance, publishing Le Cahier noir clandestinely under a pseudonym. After the Nobel Prize of 1952 he became one of France’s most influential journalists; his weekly ‘Bloc-notes’ denounced the use of torture in Algeria and supported de Gaulle. He encouraged Elie Wiesel to write about the camps and contributed the foreword to Night. He died in Paris in 1970.