Julien Green

Julien Green

Julien Green (1900-1998) was born in Paris of American parents. After having fought as a volunteer in the French army during the first world war, he made higher studies in the United States, which familiarized him with authors such as Hawthorne and Blake. Then he settled in Paris to study painting and music. Belonging to a Protestant family, he converted to Catholicism. His first novels describe tormented passions amidst a suffocating and provincial climate: "Adrienne Mesurat" (1927), "Leviatán" (1929). Then his narrative was focused on a hallucinated deepening of the inner life, for works such as "Depart before the day" (1963) or "Thousand open roads" (1964) to evoke his childhood and adolescence. His "Diario" (1938-1955) documents the intellectual evolution of the writer, who was also a dramatic author with works such as "Sur" (1953), "El enemigo" (1954) or "La sombra" (1958).