François Mauriac

Mauriac grew up among the pine forests and vineyards near Bordeaux that recur throughout his fiction, in a devout, tightly wound Catholic family whose repressions he spent his career anatomizing. Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927) drew loosely on a real regional poisoning case; his heroine's guilt without repentance became the signature Mauriac predicament: sin observed with total moral seriousness, but never simplified into either damnation or easy grace.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1952. In later decades he became one of France's most prominent political journalists, a vocal opponent of Franco's Spain and, controversially for his conservative readership, of French torture during the Algerian War, while remaining close to Charles de Gaulle.

He died in Paris in 1970.