Duras was one of France's most important and most prolific writers in the twentieth century. During her long writing career, she produced a large number of texts in a wide variety of genres. She is best known for her prize-winning autobiographical novel L'amant (1984) and the screenplay for Alan Resnais's 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour.

Biographical Information

Duras was born Marguerite Donnadieu on April 4, 1914, in a small town near Saigon, French Indochina (now Vietnam). Her parents, Henri Donnadieu and Marie Legrand Donnadieu, were teachers, originally from the northern part of France. Although her father's death in 1918 and her mother's purchase of worthless land from the corrupt colonial government left the family in financial distress, Duras nonetheless was able to attend the Lycée de Saigon where she studied both French and Vietnamese. In 1931, she left Indochina to study at the Sorbonne, where she completed a degree in law and political...