ROGER MARTIN DU GARD (1947)

Novelist and dramatist whose works are not only a vast panoramic survey of the society of his time but also a profound exploration of its meaning.

He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1937 "For the artistic vigour and truthfulness with which he has pictured human contrasts as well as some fundamental aspects of human life".

He assigned himself to the role of objective investigator and his carefully documented and precisely observed works influenced such later writers as Albert Camus and Roman Gary.

Born into a professional middle class family he studied at the École des Chartes Paris and qualified as an archivist and paleographer in 1905.

He served with a motor-transport unit throughout World War I and for a brief period before and after worked with Jacques Copeau at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier but he spent the remainder of his life in seclusion wholy devoted to his writing.

His first novel Devenir! (1908) depicted a would-be writer whose talents did not match his ambitions. Jean Barois (1913) traced the development of an intellectual torn between the Catholic faith of his childhood and the materialism of maturity; it also described the full impact of the Dreyfus casa on French minds. In Les Thibault (1922-40) a novel cycle in eight parts, the protagonists are two middle class brothers. The younger Jacques Thibault rebels against his pharisaical Catholic father and the social order of his day. He is killed in the first days of World War I while on a pacifist propaganda mission to the armies in Alsace; Antoine the elder is a dedicated doctor who sees no reason to reorganize society. He enlists at the outbreak of war, is gassed and dies in November 1918. The outstanding features of Les Thibault are the wide range of human relationships patiently explored, the graphic realism of the sickbed and death scenes and in the seventh volume L´Été 1914, the dramatic description of Europe´s nations being swept into war. The vast scale of the work was inspired by the desire to emulate Tolstoy´s War and Peace; the corrosive pessimism pervading the strictly impersonal narrative recalls Flaubert.

Martin du Gard also wrote two peasant farces Le Testament du Père Leley (1913) and La Gonfle (1928) as well as a sombre Naturalist drama on homosexuality Un Taciturne (1931). His other works include Confidence africaine (1931), a short, sober account of an incestuous liaison, Vieille France (1933), bitter sketches of French village life, and Notes sur André Gide (1951).

In 1941 he began work on Le Journal du colonel de Maumort, a vast novel that he hoped would prove to be his masterpiece but that was still unfinished at his death.

The Oeuvres complètes de Roger Martin du Gard with preface by Camus was published in two volumes in 1955.