Genevoix, Maurice, 1890-1980

Maurice Genevoix (French: [mɔʁis ʒǝnvwa, moʁ-]; 29 November 1890 – 8 September 1980) was a French author and WWI veteran who is best known for his book Ceux de 14 (lit. 'Those of 14' or 'The Men of 1914'), regarded as one of the great firsthand accounts of that conflict. His body of work reflects harmonious relationships between people, between man and nature, and between man and death. Though he inherited the tradition of literary realism, his writing is marked by vivid recollection, a concern for precision, and a poetic sensibility. A graduate of the École normale supérieure in Paris, he admired the eloquence of craftsmen and peasants just as much as that of scholars. Remarkably vital despite the wounds he suffered in combat during the First World War, and driven by a determination to bear witness, he continued writing until his final days. Sustained by a desire to preserve what he considered worth remembering, his work, the product of a long literary career, comprises fifty-six books. His is best known is for his work shaped by the trauma of The Great War (1914 to 1918), most notably in Ceux de 14 (The Men of 1914), a collection of war narratives, published between 1916 and 1923, compiled in 1949. It has been regarded as one of the great firsthand accounts of that conflict. He also turned more broadly and intimately to his own life in an autobiography, Trente mille jours ('Thirty Thousand Days', not translated in English), published in 1980. He is also known in France for his regionalist novels inspired by the Sologne and Loire Valley regions, such as Raboliot, which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1925. However, he went beyond the conventions of French rural fiction (roman du terroir) through a restrained poetic talent that, combined with his deep knowledge of nature. This produced admired prose poems such as La Dernière Harde (1938) or 'The Last Herd', and La Forêt perdue or 'The Lost Forest' (1967), that have neither yet translated into English. La Dernière Harde, in which a hunter's obsessive pursuit of a great stag has been likened to Captain Ahab's pursuit of the whale in Moby-Dick, is considered one of Genevoix's masterworks. By decision of French President Emmanuel Macron, Maurice Genevoix's coffin was interred at the Panthéon in Paris on 11 November 2020, day of the Armistice of World War One.