Charles Du Bos

Charles Du Bos was a French essayist and critic, known for works including Approximations (1922–37), a seven-volume collection of essays and letters, and for his Journal, an autobiographical work published posthumously from 1946 to 1961. His other work included Byron et le besoin de la fatalité (1929), a study of Lord Byron, and Dialogue avec André Gide, an essay on his friend André Gide. Influenced by thinkers including Henri Bergson, Georg Simmel and Friedrich Nietzsche, Du Bos was well-known as a literary critic in France in the 1920s and 1930s. He maintained a distance from the political developments of those decades, while nonetheless seeking in his writing to reframe political phenomena as ethical problems. Alongside Gide and the American novelist Edith Wharton, he was involved in providing aid to Belgian refugees in Paris following the 1914 German invasion of Belgium. Raised Catholic, Du Bos lost his faith as a young man, then regained it in 1927, and regarded this conversion as the central event of his life.