Roger Martin du Gard

Roger Martin du Gard was born in 1881 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, outside Paris. He trained as a palaeographer and archivist, and the habits of that discipline — objectivity, scrupulous documentation, patience with detail — shaped all his fiction, which critics have placed in the line of nineteenth-century realism and naturalism. His sympathies lay with the humanist socialism and pacifism of Jean Jaurès.

His first significant novel, Jean Barois (1913), set an individual’s loss of faith against the intellectual battles of the Dreyfus affair. His life’s work was Les Thibault, a multi-volume roman-fleuve that follows two brothers — Antoine, a doctor, and the rebellious Jacques — from their upbringing in a prosperous Catholic bourgeois family. Six parts appeared between 1922 and 1929. He then abandoned a seventh volume in manuscript and changed course: L’Été 1914 (1936) and the Épilogue (1940), together longer than all that preceded them, turn the family chronicle into a searching account of the weeks before the First World War and carry the story to 1918. He also wrote plays, the stories of Vieille France, and a memoir of his long friendship with André Gide.

The Nobel Prize, awarded in 1937, came as Europe again moved towards war, and the closing volumes’ concern with how war comes gave the cycle a pressing contemporary weight. During the Second World War he lived in Nice, working on a long novel, Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort, which remained unfinished at his death in 1958 and was published in 1983.