1869–1951 · French novelist, critic and diarist · Nobel Prize in Literature, 1947
André Gide was a French novelist, critic and diarist whose career ran from the Symbolist movement of the 1890s to sharp criticism of European colonialism between the wars; he was awarded the 1947 Nobel Prize in Literature and was called in his New York Times obituary “France’s greatest contemporary man of letters.” Les Faux-monnayeurs (1925) is his most ambitious novel — a novel-within-a-novel whose writer-character Édouard is generally read as Gide’s alter ego. The shore sentence is Édouard’s manifesto for risk-taking in art, which is exactly why it survives so well as free-floating advice once it is cut loose from the book that produced it.