This is Nobel Laureate André Gide's major autobiographical statement. We may see the seeds of the themes that preoccupied him throughout his career in the incidents and musings documented here. Gide lived a life of unflinching self-examination, and his literary creations were snapshots of that existence. With If It Die, Gide set out to recount the events of his youth and the birth of his philosophical wanderings without sentiment or exaggeration, and in doing so, to bring it all to light. If It Die is a significant book of twentieth-century literature because of Gide's unashamed depiction of his awakening homosexual yearning and his portrait of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas as they indulged in decadence in North Africa. ( )

Published in France in 1902 as Si le grain ne meurt. ( )