Word: goncourts
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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France's Prix Femina is a literary award (5,000 francs) that was created in 1904 to lend to novels by and about women a prestige formerly denied them: France's top literary honor, the august Prix Goncourt, is reserved for male authors only. Last week, the 17 elderly French women writers who award the Prix Femina found their task too grisly, seemed about ready to leave prize-giving to the menfolk. "Life in today's novel," said one of the judges in an interview, "is twisted to eroticism. For instance...
...Paris, Guy found rich compensations for his drudgery. He was befriended by the great novelist Gustave Flaubert and brought into the master's Sunday literary circle. There he sat at the feet of Europe's literary greats: Turgenev, Zola, Edmond de Goncourt, Alphonse Daudet, Hippolyte Taine and occasionally Henry James. Zola remembered De Maupassant as "a proud he-man [who] told us dumfounding stories about women, amorous swaggerings that sent Flaubert into roars of laughter...
...Paris, Sacha Guitry, 63, had a slight collision. A court assessed the famed Jack-of-all-theatrics and a friend 700,000 francs (about $2,300) for causing "grave prejudice" to the Goncourt Academy. Each year the academy hands some novelist a Goncourt Prize, but Guitry and the academy have been on the outs. So this year Guitry awarded his own "Goncourt Prize" to a novel of his own choice. The book was labeled Prix Goncourt in big letters, and Le Goncourt Hors de Goncourt in little ones...
...Long Holiday is his first-person story of 56 months spent in seven forced-labor and concentration camps, 118 days of that time in solitary confinement. In France, the book won the first Goncourt prize to be awarded in six years, sold over 200,000 copies within a year. No literary achievement, it is a thoughtful and simple account of man's courage and man's weakness under demoralizing brutality...
Elsa Triolet is the wife of Poet Louis Aragon, one of whose recent volumes was named The Eyes of Elsa. In 1944, she won France's Prix Goncourt with her short stories; but readers are not likely to find her new book a prizewinner...