Julien Green Biography Quotes 11 Report mistakes

Background and Early Life
Julien Green was born in Paris in 1900 to American parents whose roots lay in the Protestant South of the United States. Raised in a bilingual household, he absorbed from childhood the tension between two cultural and spiritual worlds: a French city that shaped his sensibility and an American inheritance that supplied the moral and religious rigor of his upbringing. The Bible, hymns, and a Southern family memory gave him an inner vocabulary of sin, grace, and judgment that would later animate his fiction. The upheaval of the First World War arrived during his adolescence and impressed on him both the fragility of life and the potency of fear and desire, central motifs of the novels he would begin to imagine while still very young.

Education and Formative Influences
After schooling in Paris, he spent time in the United States, notably at the University of Virginia, where the landscape and family ties of the American South deepened his sense of belonging to two countries at once. That experience confirmed a lifelong doubleness: he would remain an American by nationality but write primarily in French, a decision that placed him at the heart of French letters while keeping his perspective slightly askew, observant, and independent. Back in Paris, he discovered the circle of the Nouvelle Revue Francaise. Encouraged by figures such as Andre Gide and guided editorially by Jean Paulhan at Gallimard, he found a home for his early texts and the discipline to turn his private obsessions into art.

Literary Debut and Major Themes
Green's first novels, including Mont-Cinere and Adrienne Mesurat, established his signature atmosphere: feverish, dreamlike, and morally charged. Leviathan confirmed him as a novelist of rare psychological tension, exploring the secret lives of solitary characters whose desires confound the codes of family and society. Across novels and stories he probed the zones where sexuality, guilt, and spiritual yearning intersect; the drama often unfolds in muted interiors, provincial streets, and night landscapes where conscience and temptation argue in whispers. He also wrote plays, among them Sud, drawing on the American South to stage conflicts of loyalty, honor, and forbidden love. Moira, set in the United States, returned to the turbulence of awakening desire in a religious milieu, while Chaque homme dans sa nuit pressed further into the darkness of self-knowledge. Many critics likened his moral gravity to Nathaniel Hawthorne and his psychological subtlety to Henry James, even as his voice remained unmistakably his own.

Between France and the United States
Green's life moved between Paris and America. During the Second World War he left occupied France for the United States, taking part in French-language broadcasts and cultural efforts in support of the Allied cause. He lectured, wrote, and maintained ties with editors and friends on both sides of the Atlantic. After the war he returned to Paris yet continued to travel to the United States, replenishing his imagination with the landscapes and memories of the South that had nourished him since childhood. Gaston Gallimard published his books in France, and he ensured English versions appeared in the United States, sometimes translating or revising them himself to preserve their cadence in both languages.

The Journal and Autobiographical Writing
Running in parallel to his novels was his Journal, one of the great diaries of the twentieth century in French. Begun in the 1920s and pursued for decades, it records his work, his reading, and the weather of his soul: the oscillation between faith and doubt, the demands of writing, and the daily negotiations with fear, desire, and solitude. The Journal also contains portraits of contemporaries, among them Andre Gide, Francois Mauriac, and Paul Claudel, whom he met in literary and religious contexts. The candor and stylistic precision of the diary illuminate his fiction from within, revealing how scenes were born from dreams, liturgical cadences, or fleeting encounters in a Paris street. Later autobiographical volumes returned to his childhood and Southern family history, mapping the sources of his imagination with the same lucid, sometimes pitiless honesty that shaped his novels.

Recognition and the Academie francaise
Green's singular position as an American writing in French culminated in his election to the Academie francaise, where he became the first member not holding French nationality to join the institution. The distinction recognized both the consistent excellence of his prose and the originality of his themes, which fused French classicism with a Southern American conscience. His reception within the Academie acknowledged a career already rich in novels, plays, essays, and diary volumes, and it affirmed his place among the major writers of his century. He wore honors lightly, remaining focused on daily work and the exacting craft of the sentence.

Personal Life
Green's inner life was marked by a serious, sometimes severe spiritual temperament shaped by Protestant childhood reading and a later attraction to Catholicism. He moved toward and away from the Church at different moments, though the drama of belief and the language of prayer stayed at the core of his sensibility. Discretion governed his private affairs, yet he did not conceal in his Journal the challenges posed by his sexuality, treating them with lucidity and without self-pity. For many years the journalist and writer Robert de Saint Jean was a central presence in his life, a confidant and collaborator who helped protect the continuity of his work and the publication of his papers. Their intellectual companionship, along with friendships in the world of letters and publishing, sustained him through periods of doubt and illness.

Later Years and Legacy
Through the second half of the century Green continued to publish novels, theater, essays, and new installments of the Journal. His later writings often returned to memory as a form of truth-telling, stripping away self-justification in favor of exact recollection. He died in Paris in 1998, having lived nearly the whole span of the century that his work anatomized with such intensity. Posthumous editions of his diary and correspondence broadened the portrait of the writer at work, and they confirmed the coherence of an oeuvre that had always kept faith with a few essential themes: the struggle for purity of heart, the beauty and danger of desire, and the mystery of grace. Today he stands as an American-born master of the French language, a novelist and diarist whose pages, published by Gallimard and read by generations of writers and readers, continue to haunt with their austere music. The duality that once set him apart is now central to his appeal: a life written at the crossing of two cultures, two spiritual traditions, and two homelands, unified by the exactness of a style that never ceased to seek the truth of the human heart.

Our collection contains 11 quotes who is written by Julien, under the main topics: Truth - Meaning of Life - Writing - Deep - Free Will & Fate.