Martin Du Gard, Roger

Autor: Martin Du Gard, Roger
Rok: 1881-1958

Biogr./Hist. údaje: Francouzský prozaik a dramatik, nositel Nobelovy ceny za literaturu z r. 1937.
Zdroj: Autoritní databáze Národní knihovny ČR

Roger Martin du Gard (French: [dy gaʁ]; 23 March 1881 – 22 August 1958) was a French author and novelist, winner of the 1937 Nobel Prize for Literature.Trained as a paleographer and archivist, he brought to his works a spirit of objectivity and a scrupulous regard for detail, and because of his concern with documentation and the relationship of social reality to individual development, his fiction has been linked with the realist and naturalist traditions of the 19th century.He is best known for The Thibaults, a multi-volume roman fleuve which follows the fortunes of two brothers, Antoine and Jacques Thibault, from their upbringing in a prosperous Catholic bourgeois family to the end of the First World War. Six parts of the novel were published between 1922 and 1929.A seventh volume in manuscript was abandoned before he completed the two final installments, l'Été 1914 and l'Épilogue. Written under the shadow of the darkening international situation in Europe in the 1930s, these last parts, which together are longer than the previous six combined, focus on the political and historical situation leading up to the outbreak of the First World War, and conclude with the death of Antoine Thibault in 1918.Martin du Gard wrote several other novels, including Jean Barois, which was set against the historical context of the Dreyfus Affair. During the Second World War, he resided in Nice, where he prepared a novel (Souvenirs du lieutenant-colonel de Maumort) which remained unfinished at his death. It was posthumously published in 1983. His other works include plays and a memoir of André Gide, a longtime friend.Roger Martin du Gard died in 1958 and was buried in the Cimiez Monastery Cemetery in Cimiez, a suburb of the city of Nice, France.