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Julien Hartridge Green
(1900 - 1998) U.S.A. - France

Julien Green

Novelist, playwright, and essayist

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Green was the first and so far only foreign member of the Académie Française, remarkable for his longevity and his ability to reinvent himself. Born into an English-speaking Protestant family in Paris, he never wholly took his ancestral tongue. His first reinvention was to exchange his American name Julian forr the French Julien. Though French in culture and a major French cultural figure, he never severed his links with the US or took French nationality.

Julien GreenAfter serving as a stretcher-bearer in WWI (all he was allowed to do as a foreigner), he went to the US to study at the University of Virginia; he spent WWII in America as well. After his mother's death, Green followed his father into the Catholic church.

In advanced years he reinvented himself again, revealing that even ash he was penning the novels that earned him a place in the Académie, he was having a turbulent gay sex-life. Religion and homosexuality coexisted uneasily, though. He saw homosexuality as an insoluble problem, adding "All you can say is why?". Green had, for a long while, a partner who, as often in France, became an adopted son. One of the great worries of his later life was finding a church that would allow them both to share a tomb.

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Source: excerpts from: Aldrich R. & Wotherspoon G., Who's Who in Contemporary Gay and Lesbian History, from WWII to Present Day, Routledge, London, 2001

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