Roger Martin du Gard

Roger Martin du Gard (1881-1958) was a French novelist and winner of the 1937 Nobel Prize in Literature. Writing in French during the first decades of the twentieth century, he lived through the Dreyfus affair, the First World War and the political tensions of the 1930s. He is remembered above all for The Thibaults, a long sequence of novels that stands among the most ambitious works of European fiction of its time.

He came from a comfortable family of lawyers and magistrates, which allowed him to devote himself to literature without needing a practical trade. He felt his calling early; by his own account, reading Tolstoy's War and Peace made him fully aware of it. He enrolled in literature studies to strengthen that vocation but did not complete the degree. He then entered the École des chartes and qualified as an archivist-paleographer with a thesis on the abbey of Jumièges. That training in documents and accuracy left a visible mark on his prose.

His first novel, Devenir, appeared in 1908. With Jean Barois (1913), set against the Dreyfus affair, he established his reputation and formed friendships with André Gide and Jacques Copeau. He served as a soldier in the First World War, and once it ended he began the work that would define him: The Thibaults, following two brothers, Antoine and Jacques, from a prosperous Catholic bourgeois upbringing to the close of the war. The early volumes came out between 1922 and 1929; he added two more in 1936 and 1940, covering the political crisis that led to 1914.

He did not set out to prove a thesis or to pass judgement. He observed the changing society, religion and politics of his time with close attention to detail and to the inner lives of his characters. For this reason he is often placed within the realist and naturalist traditions of the nineteenth century, yet his descriptive precision and psychological insight give his fiction a character of its own. His sympathy for the humanist socialism and pacifism of Jean Jaurès is evident throughout.

During the Second World War he lived mainly in Nice, where he began a novel that remained unfinished, Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort, published posthumously. That work, together with other posthumous writings, has made his legacy more complex to assess. After a period of little critical attention following his Nobel recognition, Albert Camus revived interest in his work. He died in 1958 in Sérigny and was buried in Nice. He is now read as a patient chronicler of Europe in his age.