Editing André Gide (section)

===Writings===
André Gide's writings spanned many genres – "As a master of prose narrative, occasional dramatist and translator, literary critic, letter writer, essayist, and diarist, André Gide provided twentieth-century French literature with one of its most intriguing examples of the man of letters."<ref>Article on ''André Gide'' in ''Contemporary Authors Online'' 2003.</ref>

But as Gide's biographer Alan Sheridan points out, "It is the fiction that lies at the summit of Gide's work."<ref>Information in this paragraph is extracted from ''André Gide: A Life in the Present'' by Alan Sheridan, pp. 629–33.</ref> "Here, as in the ''oeuvre'' as a whole, what strikes one first is the variety. Here, too, we see Gide's curiosity, his youthfulness, at work: a refusal to mine only one seam, to repeat successful formulas...The fiction spans the early years of Symbolism, to the "comic, more inventive, even fantastic" pieces, to the later "serious, heavily autobiographical, first-person narratives"...In France Gide was considered a great stylist in the classical sense, "with his clear, succinct, spare, deliberately, subtly phrased sentences."

Gide's surviving letters run into the thousands. But it is the ''Journal'' that Sheridan calls "the pre-eminently Gidean mode of expression."<ref>Information in this paragraph is extracted from ''André Gide: A Life in the Present'' by Alan Sheridan, p. 628.</ref> "His first novel emerged from Gide's own journal, and many of the first-person narratives read more or less like journals. In ''[[The Counterfeiters (novel)|Les faux-monnayeurs]]'', Edouard's journal provides an alternative voice to the narrator's." "In 1946, when Pierre Herbert asked Gide which of his books he would choose if only one were to survive," Gide replied, 'I think it would be my ''Journal.'''"  Beginning at the age of 18 or 19, Gide kept a journal all of his life and when these were first made available to the public, they ran to 1,300 pages.<ref>''Journals: 1889–1913'' by André Gide, trans. by Justin O'Brien, p. xii.</ref>