André Gide

Gide grew up under his widowed Protestant mother's strict moral watch, then spent his adult life systematically dismantling it, marrying his cousin Madeleine in a marriage most historians believe was never consummated, while pursuing relationships with young men on trips to North Africa that he later described candidly in Corydon and the autobiography If It Die. In 1908 he co-founded the Nouvelle Revue Française, which became France's most influential literary journal and publishing house; he initially rejected Proust's Swann's Way for it, a decision he called his life's greatest editorial regret.

A visit to the Soviet Union in 1936 turned him from a fellow traveler into one of the Communist left's most damaging early critics, after Return from the USSR detailed what he'd actually seen. He won the Nobel Prize in 1947 and died in Paris in 1951.