François Mauriac

Edward Welch (University of Aberdeen)
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François Mauriac (1885-1970) is perhaps most remembered for his success as a novelist in the 1920s and 1930s, which he achieved in particular thanks to such works as

Thérèse Desqueyroux

(1927) and

Le Nœud de vipères

(1932), and which led to him being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1952. Yet fiction, in fact, represents only a part of his output, alongside poetry, theatre, and, above all, journalism. Indeed, the Nobel Prize was awarded precisely at the moment when he was beginning to take his leave of the novel and establishing himself as one of the most prominent political commentators of the 1950s and 1960s. His critical interventions over the Algerian War especially, made in the weekly newspaper column he called the

Bloc-notes

, saw his emergence as a radical voice whose…

3165 words

Citation: Welch, Edward. "François Mauriac". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 21 January 2008 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3005, accessed 19 March 2024.]

3005 François Mauriac 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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