JULIEN GREEN was a good man haunted by a dark double. One of the great themes of his writing and of his life was conflict between the opposing forces of spiritual purity and sexual passion. He often referred, in his massive journals, to his...

Julien Green es uno de los escritores que inexplicadamente han recibido poca atención por parte de los lectores y la crítica en nuestro país. Hijo de norteamericanos, nace en París en 1900 y ha publicado en francés obras fundamentales como Leviatán; El visionario,...

Julien Green's novels aim and unfold towards sign, which becomes identifiable as symbol. I do not wish to imply that Green is a Symbolist novelist in the same formal or historical sense as the nineteenth-century Symbolists. I do maintain that his particular style, his manner of creating a world, his process of characterization, and his own relationship to his books lead to the creation of an extremely private, perhaps hermetic work of art, which, while it has the conventional form and characteristics...

It is a temptation not always easily avoided to discuss the work of Julien Green by way of thematic or atmospheric generalizations, as opposed to an appreciation of precise narrative and artistic qualities. Gloomy, sultry, ominous; the epithets are by now very familiar—too familiar, perhaps, for they tend to deflect critical attention from Green's concern with problems of literary form and style…. In complete contrast to [the] earlier novels, which were set either in the United States o...

My own contention is that the works set in America are, in fact, exceptionally significant in revealing the true Julien Green through his fiction. This belief is based in large part upon the author's stressing the age twenty in his life—the age he reached during his first stay in America from 1919 to 1922—as that point at which he attained his definitive character…. There are two general areas in which the frustrations of Green's American characters are primarily a reflect...