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

(1927) and

(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

, saw his emergence as a radical voice whose…

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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 21 November 2024.]

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