Mauriac's fictional world is that of his childhood and adolescence in the Landes region in the period about 1900, which he evokes with poetic intensity his primary theme, the clash between sin and the desire for religious salvation. Awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1952, Mauriac became, after De Gaulle's return to power in 1958, one of the President's most passionate supporters. More novels, stage plays, volumes of criticism, memoirs, and diaries brought Mauriac's total number of books to over 60. After the Liberation he continued to write hard-hitting political articles in several newspapers. Franco's insurrection in Spain and later, after the German defeat of France in 1940, helped the cause of the French Resistance with his pen. In the late 1930s Mauriac found politics coming to the forefront of his attention: he denounced Gen. Other works of this period include biographies, more poetry, and religious essays. In 1933 Mauriac was elected to the French Academy. Now he began to stress the possibility of divine grace, even for the hardened atheist and family tyrant who is the hero of Le Noeud de vipères (1932 Vipers' Tangle), the most successful of the later novels. Earlier he had been criticized for portraying sinners more attractively than believers in the narrow, provincial, middle-class families of his novels, where, as all sexuality implies sin, love and happiness become impossible. From 1920 date Mauriac's most productive years as a novelist, his novels including Le Baiser au lépreux (1922 A Kiss for the Leper), Genitrix (1923 Genitrix), Le Désert de l'amour (1925 The Desert of Love), and Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927 Thérèse ).Ībout 1928 came a religious crisis in Mauriac's life, with a corresponding change of emphasis in his works. He published his first volume of poems in 1909 more poetry and two novels followed before he was mobilized as an army medical orderly in 1914. Educated at a Catholic school and at Bordeaux University, Mauriac moved to Paris in 1906, determined to become a writer. He lost his father in infancy, but the influence of his mother, a stern and puritanical Catholic, pervades his literary works. 11, 1885, of a prosperous middle-class family. The French author François Mauriac (1885-1970), a fervent Catholic, is best known for his novels, usually set in Bordeaux or the Landes district of southwestern France, with their central themes of faith, sin, and divine grace.įrançois Mauriac was born in Bordeaux on Nov.
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