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André Paul Guillaume Gide ( November 22, 1869 - February 19, 1951) was a French author and spokesman for gay rights.

Gide was born in Paris, France on November 22, 1869. His father was a Paris University professor of law and died 1880. His uncle was the political economist Charles Gide . Gide was brought up in isolated conditions in Normandy and became a prolific writer at an early age. In 1895, after his mother's death, he married his cousin Madeleine Rondeaux but the marriage remained unconsummated.

In 1891 Gide published his first novel, Les Cahiers d'André Walter. From 1893-94 Gide traveled in northern Africa. He befriended Oscar Wilde in Algiers and later began to recognize his homosexual orientation. In 1896 he was mayor of a commune in Normandy.

In 1908 Gide helped found the literary magazine Nouvelle Revue française (The New French Review).

In the 1920s Gide became an inspiration for writers like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1923 he published a book on Fyodor Dostoyevsky; however, when he defended homosexuality in the public edition of Corydon (1924) he received widespread condemnation. He later considered this his most important work.

In 1923 he conceived a daughter named Catherine with another woman, Maria Van Rysselberghe. His wife Madeleine died in 1938. Later he used the background of his unconsummated marriage in his novel Et Nunc Manet in Te (1951).

After 1925 he began to demand more humane conditions for criminals. From 1925-26 he was a special envoy for the colonial ministry. In 1926 he published an autobiography, Si le grain ne meurt and journeyed to the CongoFrench Equatorial Africa Afrique Equatoriale Francaise or AEF was the federation of French colonial possessions in Middle Africa, extending northwards from the Congo River to the Sahara Desert. Established in 1910, the federation contained four territorie with his friend Marc Allegret. They returned 1927. In his report he criticized the behavior of French business interests in the Congo and inspired reform.

During the 1930s he briefly became a communistThis article is about communism as a form of society, as an ideology advocating that form of society, and as a popular movement. For issues regarding the organization of the communist movement, see the Communist party article. For issues regarding one-par, but became disillusioned after his visit to Soviet UnionThe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR ( Russian: ; tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik (SSSR) also called the Soviet Union ( ; tr. Sovetsky Soyuz , was a state in much of the northern region of Eurasia that existed from 1922 until 1. His criticism of communism caused him to lose many of his socialist friends, especially when he made a clean break with it in Retour de L'U.S.S. in 1936.

Gide left France for Africa in 1942 and lived there until the end of the World War Two. In 1947Events January January 1 British mines nationalized January 1 Nigeria gains limited autonomy January 1 The Canadian Citizenship Act went into effect January 3 Proceedings of the United States Congress are televised for the first time. January 10 United Na, he received the Nobel Prize in LiteratureThe Nobel Prize in literature is awarded annually to an author from any country who has produced "the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency". The "work" in this case generally refers to an author's work as a whole, not to any individual work, th.

Gide died on February 19, 1951. The Catholic Church placed his works on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1952.

Gide's novels, including L'Immoraliste ( 1902), La Porte Étroite ( 1909), and Les Faux Monnayeurs ( 1925), often deal with the kind of moral dilemmas that faced him in real life.