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From My Journal
Andre Maurois
*From My Journal* is a diary-memoir by André Maurois, the French novelist and biographer, recording a single year as he readjusted to postwar life. Maurois — celebrated between the wars for elegant biographies of Shelley, Byron, and Disraeli — had spent the Second World War in exile, and this 1947 book (translated by Joan Charles) catches him taking stock of himself, of a bruised France, and of a world remaking itself. It is less a chronicle of events than a cultivated mind thinking aloud: reflections on literature, aging, politics, and the art of living, set down day by day. For readers who enjoy the essayistic diary, it is graceful, humane company — the work of a writer more interested in wisdom than in confession.
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The author
André Maurois (1885–1967) was the pen name of Émile Herzog, a French novelist, essayist, and biographer elected to the Académie française. He won an international readership with polished biographies of English literary figures — Shelley (Ariel), Byron, and Disraeli among them — and spent the Second World War in exile, partly in the United States.
The book
Published by Harper & Brothers in 1947, in Joan Charles's translation, From My Journal records a year of readjustment after the war. Rather than reporting events, Maurois uses the diary form to reflect on literature, aging, morality, politics, and the recovery of a shattered Europe, in the measured, aphoristic style that made his essays popular.
How it reads
It reads as a series of civilized meditations — a book to sample a few pages at a time. The specific postwar anxieties date it, but the reflective temper and the quality of the mind behind it keep it worth revisiting for admirers of the literary journal.
For more context
Readers can go on to Maurois's biographies and to the wider tradition of the French literary diary, from Amiel to Gide.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Andre Maurois
- Publisher
- Harper & Brothers
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 1947
- Edition
- First edition
- ISBN
- None
- Format
- Hardcover
- Shelf
- Biography & Memoir
- Location
- Maine
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