Jean Giono was a French writer who wrote works of fiction mostly set in the Provence region of France.
11 Facts About Jean Giono
2.
Jean Giono was born to a family of modest means, his father a cobbler of Piedmontese descent and his mother a laundry woman.
3.
Jean Giono spent the majority of his life in Manosque, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence.
4.
Jean Giono continued to work at the bank until he was called up for military service at the outbreak of World War I Jean Giono took part in the Battle of Verdun.
5.
The result of Jean Giono's former peace-making efforts was that he was briefly imprisoned as a Nazi sympathiser before the proceedings were dropped without any charges being laid.
6.
The subsequent period of renewal saw the self-educated Jean Giono now turn to Stendhal as a literary model in the same way as previously he had been influenced by the Classics.
7.
Jean Giono adopted the Stendhalian narrative technique of letting the reader into the experience of the protagonist by means of the interior monologue, whereas the dominant technique of his earlier novels had been that of the omniscient narrator.
8.
Jean Giono similarly formed the ambition of writing a sequence of ten novels inspired by Balzac's Comedie humaine, in which he would depict characters from all strata of society rather than peasants, and compare and contrast different moments in history by depicting the experiences of members of the same family in times a hundred years apart.
9.
In 1944, when France was liberated, Jean Giono was again accused of collaboration with the Nazis, and was again imprisoned for five months before he was freed without charges ever being made.
10.
Jean Giono ultimately set it aside, no doubt considering it too derivative, and moved on to the other projects it gave rise to.
11.
Jean Giono thus declined to receive any royalties from this text, and granted free use to anyone who wanted to distribute or translate it.