- Giono, Jean
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▪ French authorborn March 30, 1895, Manosque, Fr.died Oct. 8, 1970, ManosqueFrench novelist, a celebrant of nature whose works are set in Provence and whose rich and diverse imagery has been widely admired.A love of nature came to Giono from his mountain town and from the shepherd family with whom, as a boy, he spent his summers. He was largely self-taught. As an infantryman in World War I, he was one of his company's 11 survivors at Verdun. He later described the horrors of war in Le grand troupeau (1931; To the Slaughterhouse).In 1922 he published poems in a Marseille review. His popularity grew in the late 1920s with a series of regionalist, anti-intellectual novels about the nobility of simple people. This series culminated in such works as the trilogy Le Chant du monde (1934; Song of the World), which, like most of his work, was the protest of a sensitive man against modern civilization. In 1939 Giono spent two months in jail for pacifist activities. In 1945 he was held captive by a communist band of Resistance fighters who construed pacifism as collaboration with the Nazis. French Liberationist writers blacklisted him, but a vigorous defense by author André Gide helped lift the stigma, and in 1954 Giono was elected to the Académie Goncourt.After the war he developed a new style: concise, lean, concentrating on storytelling, and yielding a slightly more optimistic note. Among his best works of these years are Le Hussard sur le toit (1952; The Horseman on the Roof) and Le Bonheur fou (1957; The Straw Man). The later novels Deux cavaliers de l'orage (1965; Two Riders of the Storm) and Ennemonde et autres caractères (1968) are lyrical portrayals of the people and countryside of Giono's beloved Provence.
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Universalium. 2010.
