Born Marguerite Donnadieu on April 4, 1914 in Gia-Dinh, Indochina (now Vietnam), Duras best-known novel was the autobiographical. LÃ?¢??Amant, translated into English as The Lover in 1984. Her father died when she was four years old, leaving her mother to raise her and her two siblings. At 18, she left Indochina for France to study law and politics, graduating in 1935. She eventually chose the pen name of Duras, the name of a city near where her father had lived.  In 1930, she married a fellow writer, Robert Antelme but the couple divorced 16 years later. Her first book, Les Impudents, was published in 1942.

During World War II, she joined the French Resistance party and became a Communist, but was expelled in 1950. Soon after, she became a full-time writer, and produced eight novels by the end of the decade. Her major works from that period include Un Barrage Contre Le Pacifique (1950), Le Marin de Gibraltar (1952), and Le Square (1955).

Beginning in 1960, Duras began a decade of not only writing novels, but also of plays and film scripts. She wrote six novels, four plays and two film scripts that were published. She was also the screenwriter of Hiroshima, Mon Amour, which received an Academy Award nomination for best screenplay.

Throughout the 1970�¢??s, Duras devoted much of her time to film and produced 13 of them. The 1980�¢??s were also productive, as Duras published 11 novels, six plays, one film script and four films. She published her last book in 1992, which was also the year which The Lover was made into a film. Duras died in Paris in 1996 at the age of 82 of cancer.

Advertisement:

 

 

 

Articles About Duras, Marguerite

Marguerite Duras In Sa Dec

February 4, 2007

French writer Marguerite Duras spent some of her childhood in Sa Dec, a sprawling busy town in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. Here she set much of her autobiographical novel, The Lover. Published in France in 1984 and in its first English translation in 1985, The Lover has since been translated into more than forty languages. In its year of publication it won France's most prestigious literary award, Prix Goncourt.