Anatole France Biography

Anatole France is the pseudonym of Francois-Anatole Thibault, a much celebrated novelist and critic of his times. His father was a bookseller and young Anatole spent most of his time around books; books were what he loved the most in the world. He is known to the world primarily as a poet and a novelist, but there are several other literary genres that he covered. He wrote novels, poems, social criticisms, memoirs, and plays. He began his literary career as a journalist writing articles and notices, before moving on to publishing his poems. Known for his irony and skepticism, he had been criticized by some of his detractors for being ‘vulgar’. His writings are categorized under mainstream French Classicism that continued in the tradition of the eighteenth century French literature. He found his first big success with ‘Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard’ a novel for which he won a prize from the Academie Francaise. He had an active interest in politics and participated in the Dreyfus Affair in support of Alfred Dreyfus, an army officer falsely accused of espionage. This incident became the base for his novel, ‘Monsieur Bergeret’. His other famous works include ‘L’lle des Pingouins’ and ‘Les dieux ont soif’. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1921 for his brilliant literary achievements.