Background
Jean Giono was born on July 24, 1853 in France, to a family of modest means, his father a cobbler of Piedmontese descent and his mother a laundry woman.
(L'Homme qui plantait des arbres ecrit en 1953 correspond,...)
L'Homme qui plantait des arbres ecrit en 1953 correspond, pour Giono, a un amour reel des arbres. Enfant, il accompagnait son pere dans les collines et plantait des glands tout comme le berger evoque dans cette nouvelle. Ainsi, evoque-t-il Elzeard Bouffier, qui fait revivre son coin de terre, en plantant differentes essences d'arbres. Nous lisons ici une ode au travail, a la perseverance, a la patience devant la nature et des cycles des saisons, a l'humilite. Elzeard Bouffier montre plusieurs traits, chers a l'auteur, comme la vertu du silence et l'abnegation dans le travail solitaire jusqu'a la mort. L'action d'Elzeard Bouffier a egalement, a long terme, des consequences sociales et economiques uniques en permettant aux villages alentours, souvent desertes, d'accueillir de nouvelles familles et ainsi de revivre.
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Jean Giono was born on July 24, 1853 in France, to a family of modest means, his father a cobbler of Piedmontese descent and his mother a laundry woman.
Jean had to leave school at the age of sixteen and get a job.
In 1922 Giono published poems in a Marseille review. His popularity grew in the late 1920s with a series of regionalist, anti-intellectual novels about the nobility of simple people. This series culminated in such works as the trilogy Le Chant du monde (1934; Song of the World), which, like most of his work, was the protest of a sensitive man against modern civilization. In 1939 Giono spent two months in jail for pacifist activities. In 1945 he was held captive by a communist band of Resistance fighters who construed pacifism as collaboration with the Nazis. French Liberationist writers blacklisted him, but a vigorous defense by author André Gide helped lift the stigma, and in 1954 Giono was elected to the Académie Goncourt.
After the war he developed a new style: concise, lean, concentrating on storytelling, and yielding a slightly more optimistic note. Among his best works of these years are Le Hussard sur le toit (1952; The Horseman on the Roof) and Le Bonheur fou (1957; The Straw Man). The later novels Deux cavaliers de l’orage (1965; Two Riders of the Storm) and Ennemonde et autres caractères (1968) are lyrical portrayals of the people and countryside of Giono’s beloved Provence.
(L'Homme qui plantait des arbres ecrit en 1953 correspond,...)
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In 1920 he married a childhood friend with whom he had two children.