SOURCE: Peyre, Henri. “Jean Giono.” In The Contemporary French Novel, pp. 123-55. New York: Oxford University Press, 1955.

In following essay, Peyre summarizes Giono's work and its changing emphases during the author's lifetime.

Historians and philosophers, with their faculty for proposing impressive generalizations, will some day speculate on the ‘necessary’ correlation between society and literature in France during the period between the two world wars. In the view of these thinkers, artists and writers stand in close dependence upon the environment in which they have grown up and reflect the prevailing mood of their age. Those who have remained aloof are ruled out as solitary exceptions confirming the common rule, as the absurd saying puts it; or they are branded as dwellers in an ivory tower, who refused their duty to society.

The truth is that the spirit of an age as it is reflected in history is often...