Birth of André Gide

André Gide was born on 22 November 1869 in Paris. A French writer, Gide was a novelist, essayist and diarist who explored questions of sincerity, freedom and sexuality. His works include The Immoralist, Strait Is the Gate, The Counterfeiters and the confessional memoir If It Die, and he was a co-founder of the literary review La Nouvelle Revue Francaise. He openly addressed his homosexuality in the essay Corydon. He traveled to the Congo, where he saw abuses of colonialism, and to the Soviet Union, whose disillusioning reality he recorded in Return from the USSR. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947.

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