Although Julien Green was born in Paris, has lived there almost all his life, and has written only one book in English, those Americans who know his best fiction--especially the books that are set in the American South--are eager to claim him as an American writer. The product of proud old families from Georgia and Virginia, Green has always been profoundly conscious of his Southern heritage. The family had moved to France in 1893 when Edward Moon Green was appointed European agent for the Southern Cotton Seed Oil Company. Educated in French schools until the age of eighteen, Green attended the University of Virginia at Charlottesville for three years and has been influenced by both the French and Anglo-American cultures. His favorite readings include not only Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, Pascal, and Peguy, but Keats, Hawthorne, Dickens, and the King James Version of the Bible.

Green is known primarily as...