Andre Gide

André Paul Guillaume Gide (1869–1951) was a writer and humanist, author of plays, novels, essays, travelogues, autobiographical books, and poetry collections, literary critic, and translator of Whitman, Shakespeare, Conrad, and Rilke into French. In 1947, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his "comprehensive and artistically significant texts, in which the problems and situation of man are presented with fearless love of truth and sharp psychological insight."

In the early 1900s, André Gide was widely known as a literary critic, and in 1908 he was one of the founders of La Nouvelle Revue Française, a literary magazine that brought together progressive French writers until World War II. Until the 1920s, Gide was known mainly in avant-garde literary circles, but then became a highly influential, albeit controversial, figure.