Roger Martin du Gard

Born into the comfortable Paris bourgeoisie, Martin du Gard trained as a paleographer-archivist at the École des Chartes, and the discipline became his method: fiction assembled from documents, dialogue, and dated evidence. Jean Barois (1913), which told the Dreyfus Affair that way, made his name.

Les Thibault occupied him from 1922 to 1940: Antoine the doctor and Jacques the rebel, sons of a domineering Catholic philanthropist, tracked through love, vocation, and politics into the catastrophe of Summer 1914: the antiwar panorama the Nobel committee singled out in 1937. Tolstoy was his declared master; Gide, his closest friend, called him the epic realist the age lacked.

A reclusive perfectionist, he spent his last two decades at his Normandy estate on the never-finished Colonel Maumort, and died in 1958.