MAURIAC, CLAUDE

born April 25, 1914, Paris, France died March 22, 1996, Paris French novelist, journalist, and critic, a practitioner of the avant-garde school of nouveau roman (new novel) writers, who, in the 1950s and '60s, spurned the traditional novel. A son of the novelist Franois Mauriac, he was able to make the acquaintance of many notable French writers at his father's house and later during his career as a journalist. He worked as Charles de Gaulle's private secretary from 1944 to 1949 and was a columnist and film critic for the newspapers Le Figaro and Le Figaro Littraire from 1946 to 1977. Mauriac established his own reputation as a novelist with four works published under the general title Le Dialogue intrieur: Toutes les femmes sont fatales (1957; All Women Are Fatal), Le Dner en ville (1959, Prix Mdicis; The Dinner Party), La Marquise sortit cinq heures (1961; The Marquise Went Out at Five), and L'Agrandissement (1963; The Enlargement). These books deal with the adventures of Bertrand Carnjoux, the hero and narrator, who is both an irresistible womanizer and a cold-hearted egoist. These highly experimental novels focus on characters' states of mind and their varying experiences of time within a general atmosphere of sexual intrigue. Mauriac's best-known work, the 10-volume Le Temps immobile (197488; Time Immobilized), consists of excerpts from letters, documents, and parts of other writers' works interspersed with entries from his own diaries. These books paint a rich picture of 50 years of French intellectual life, with separate volumes devoted to his father, de Gaulle, and Marcel Proust. Mauriac is also known for L'Alittrature contemporaine (1958; The New Literature), a collection of essays on 20th-century writers.