When Julien Gracq refused the Goncourt Prize, which was awarded to him in 1951 for Le Rivage des Syrtes (translated as The Opposing Shore, 1986), it was with the conviction that literature and the writer must remain untainted by commercial interest and media exploitation. This same stance determined Gracq's association with the surrealists in the 1930s and 1940s. Refusing to become an orthodox member of the group, Gracq has consistently maintained his position as a loner in the literary world. Like Marcel Proust, he was forced to subsidize the publication of his first novel, Au château d'Argol (1938; translated The Castle of Argol, 1951), after Gallimard refused to publish it. Ironically, Gallimard plans to publish a two-volume Pléiade edition of Gracq's works, some fifty years after its initial rejection.

Born Louis Poirier in St. Florent-le-Vieil, near Nantes, in 1910, Gracq is a writer by avocation, a historian and geographer...