French Literature Reviews - 2026
A. Gide & P.-A. Laurens. Correspondence 1891-1934
Writers: Biography, Letters and Memoirs
André Gide & Paul-Albert Laurens, Correspondence 1891-1934, edited, introduced, and annotated by Pierre Masson & Jean-Michel Wittmann, Lyon, PUL, 2015, 236 p.
ISBN-13 : 978-2-7297-0894-8
20 €
Comprising 130 letters exchanged between 1891 and 1934, this correspondence traces the history of a youthful friendship that endured into maturity: that between the writer André Gide and the painter Paul-Albert Laurens (1870-1934), son of the renowned historical painter Jean-Paul Laurens.
During their journey to North Africa in 1893-1894—a decisive episode extensively recounted in If It Die..., and upon which the letters gathered here shed a wealth of new light—Laurens and Gide shared their discoveries, both travel-related and sexual, and forged a fraternal bond that would become one of the most enduring and profound of Gide's life.
This friendship also served as a network: an only child and soon an orphan, Gide found a second family in Paul-Albert Laurens, his brother Pierre, and their parents; through them, he finally discovered an artistic and literary milieu that he would never leave.
Pierre Masson is editor-in-chief of the Bulletin des Amis d’André Gide. He has published around ten volumes of his correspondence and edited his critical, autobiographical, and fictional works in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Nantes.
Jean-Michel Wittmann, Professor at the University of Lorraine, is director of the Centre d’études gidiennes. He co-edited the Dictionnaire Gide (Classiques Garnier, 2011) with Pierre Masson and contributed to the edition of Gide's novels in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
Spanning over four decades, this collection gathers one hundred and thirty letters documenting a lifelong bond between the celebrated author and the artist Paul-Albert Laurens. Edited by scholars Pierre Masson and Jean-Michel Wittmann, the volume illuminates their formative journey to North Africa in 1893 and 1894, an episode famously discussed in Gide's autobiography If It Die.... Beyond personal confidences, the letters reveal how the Laurens family provided the young, orphaned Gide with a vital social network and entry into influential artistic circles.
This scholarly edition will appeal to researchers and readers interested in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century French literary history, epistolary literature, and the biography of André Gide. The extensive annotations by specialists from the Centre d’études gidiennes offer essential historical and biographical context. It serves as an indispensable resource for understanding the intellectual networks and intimate relationships that shaped one of modern French literature's most distinctive voices.