A French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947. His career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.

Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, he exposes to public view the conflict and eventual reconciliation between the two sides of his personality, split apart by a straitlaced education and a narrow social moralism. His work can be seen as an investigation of freedom and empowerment in the face of moralistic and puritanical constraints, and gravitates around his continuous effort to achieve intellectual honesty.