If It Die An Autobiography Author:Andre Gide As a novelist and critic, Gide has many time presented us with spiritual autobiographies: here are the facts of his life, by the use of which we may better understand his values and conflicts. The notoriety achieved by this book by its homosexual passages has been exceedingly great; it has also been exceedingly disproportionate. The sexual episo... more »des recorded here had, it is true, a most significant role in Gide's moral development; it is not less true that they are described with the utmost frankness. But the book is, for all that, much less the confession of an invert than the story of a writer's early life - his school and family relationships, his adolescent growth in thinking and taste, his first attempts at authorship and his first encounters with authors.
A profitable and revealing book. It is no less a book rich in brilliant asides and in flashes of insight. As Gideiana, then, it is indispensable.
-- Louis Kronenberger, New York Times
Originally published in 1920 in an exceedingly small edition, and reprinted in 1924. The first Modern Library edition was in 1935, translated by Dorothy Bussy.« less