Julien Hartridge Green

  General Notes:

[http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Green_Julien_1900-1998]
September 6, 1900 - Julien Green is born in Paris.
1919 - Writer Julien Green begins three years of study at the University of Virginia.
1922 - Author Julien Green leaves the United States and returns to France.
1940 - Running from the events of World War II, Julien Green flees France for New York.
1945 - In the wake of World War II, Julien Green returns to Paris and to writing.
August 13, 1998 - Julien Green, novelist, playwright, and essayist, dies in Paris.


http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/jgreen.htm
Green was born Julian Hartridge Green in Paris to American parents of Scottish-Irish background. His father, Edward Moon Green, was a businessman and Secretary of the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris. Julien was last of seven children, five of them girls, and only native French speaker in his English-speaking family, he created his own private world, in which he brought for his mother's horror sex, and his own obsessions on ancestral mysteries. Mary Green, Julien's mother, was the daughter of a Savannah judge. She read the Bible daily and brought up her children as Episcopalians. After her death in 1914, Green followed his father into the Catholic Church. At the age of 17 he volunteered for the army in the World War I. From 1918 to 1922 he studied in Paris and at the University of Virginia. Green's first name Julian was changed to Julien in the late 1920s by his first publisher.

Savannah Morning News 9/19/98
Novelist Julien Green, who wrote in French about Catholicism, sexuality and the American South, has died.Green, who was 97, was the grandson of Charles Green, who built the Green-Meldrim House in Savannah in the 1850s. He died Thursday in Paris, according to French media, which reported his death Monday.
The first foreigner to be elected to the Academie Francaise -- the elite panel founded by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635 to safeguard the integrity of the French language -- Green was a prolific writer, producing more than a dozen novels, five plays, an autobiography, numerous biographies, essays and an immense daily journal.
In 1996, he relinquished his membership in the Academie, the highest honor accorded French writers, citing his advanced age and his distaste for honors.
Green's best-known works include "Sud" (South), a 1953 play about the Civil War and "Moira" (1950), a novel set at the University of Virginia centering around a student's discovery of his homosexuality. In 1995, his novel, "Dixie," the third book in a trilogy about the South, became a best-seller in France.
Green, born in Paris in 1900, was the son of Edward Moon Green and Mary Hartridge Green, who had moved to France in the 1890s. Mary Green, the Savannahian daughter of a Confederate officer, told her son numerous stories about the South, fueling many of his later works. Once describing himself as "a Southerner lost in Europe, regardless of what I do," Green maintained American citizenship throughout his life.
After serving in the French Army Ambulance Corps in World War I, Green made his first trip to the United States in 1920. He entered the University of Virginia, but left for France after two years. He returned to America several times, including the years during World War II, when he taught at Goucher College in Maryland and Mills College in California. He went back to France in 1945, never returning to this country.
Green, a devout Catholic who converted from Protestantism, published his first book in 1926. Fascinated with Gothic writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, he filled many of his novels with a dark mix of murder and madness, sex and suicide.
In 1997, Green's work was the focus of an international symposium in Savannah, drawing scholars from France and Ireland. Jean-Pierre Piriou, a professor of French at the University of Georgia who organized the event, described Green as "one of the major 20th-century French writers."