This book presents a selection of some of the most significant critical work written on Andre Gide during his lifetime and since. As a major writer of the twentieth-century, his life and creative output, as well as his role as a leading intellectual, attracted comment from prominent contemporaries and continues to have relevance today. Containing a substantial introduction and overview, this compilation offers a variety of illuminating perspectives that will inform and guide the general and specialist reader.

Taylor takes up the question of what happens when a society in which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God becomes one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is only one human possibility among others.

Most of André Gide's richly-varied literary output has long been available to American readers. Only one aspect of his protean career has been lacking in translation: the essays, the publication of which will go far to explain why Gide holds in France such high rank as a critic. Many of the essays in Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality were provoked by events in the cultural and political world of twentieth-century France, a turbulent setting that produced a lasting literature. These essays are vintage Gide, informed by his characteristic spirit—his hard brilliance, pointed honesty, and the enduring relevance of his concerns. Readers of his Journals will be prepared for the style, intelligence, and marksmanship that Gide brings to bear in these forty-two articles on life as well as on letters. His range, as always, is broad: a long and moving memoir of his encounters with Oscar Wilde; a series of combats against reactionary nationalists and self-appointed purifiers of morals; estimates of Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Proust, Gautier, and Valéry, among others; letters to Jacques Rivière, Jean Cocteau, and Francis Jammes; and general essays on art, literature, the theater, and politics. Justin O'Brien, famous for his studies in modern French literature, has written that Gide is "related to La Fontaine and Racine by his essential conciseness and crystalline style, to Montaigne and Goethe by his inquiring mind which reconciled unrest and serenity, to Baudelaire by his lucid, prophetic criticism." O'Brien, who has done so much to bring contemporary French literature to America, supervised the translations in Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality, prepared several of them himself, and contributes an informative general introduction and additional commentary to preface the various sections of this major book.

André Paul Guillaume Gide (1869-1951), known as André Gide, was a renowned French writer. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947 and founder of the prestigious publishing house Gallimard, André Gide is the author of memorable books such as "The Immoralist," "If It Die...," "Strait is the Gate," and "The Counterfeiters," among others. His work contains many autobiographical elements and explores moral, religious, and sexual conflicts. " The Immoralist" is a parable about the dialectic between nature and morality, as well as a reflection on the unfolding of individual freedom. A thought-provoking work that still retains its power to challenge complacent attitudes and unfounded cultural assumptions, it narrates the attempt of a young Parisian to overcome social and sexual conformity. " The Immoralist" is included in the famous critical selection: "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die."