Julien Green

Green, Julien (1900-98). Catholic novelist, dramatist, and memorialist, born of American parents from the Southern states, which serve as a location for some of his fiction, but brought up in Paris and of French nationality. His early novels, such as Mont-Cinère (1926), Adrienne Mesurat (1927), and Léviathan (1928), evoke a claustrophobic world in which the characters' attempts to escape turn to passion, violence, and madness; they reflect Green's difficulties in reconciling sexuality, particularly homosexuality, with Catholicism. His work in the 1930s explores the possibility of escape from this bleak world through fantasy, and his later fiction, including Moïra (1950), Chaque homme dans sa nuit (1960), and L'Autre (1971), moves towards a more optimistic vision in which salvation is finally possible. In the 1950s he turned to drama, with three plays, Sud (1953), L'Ennemi (1954), and L'Ombre (1956), which show considerable dramatic talent and reflect the concerns of the novels. His spiritual and aesthetic evolution is recounted and explored in a third major area, his work as an autobiographer and, especially, diarist, whose Journal, begun in 1926, constitutes, with those of Gide and Mauriac, one of the major 20th-c. examples of the genre. [Nicholas Hewitt]
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