As mentioned in a prior post, my path into Decadent literature was partially through reading Modernist works by openly - or as open as they could be - gay men. French avant-garde author Andre Gide (1869 - 1951) was one such. He had an additional draw in that he influenced modern masters like Sartre and Camus. The Immoralist (1902) was the first Gide novel I’d read (Modern Library edition, translated by Richard Howard). Aside from being a brilliant writer, Gide's life - even in overview - is a fascinating story of a man who continually found himself outside the norms of society and culture norms. A gay man who enjoyed an active romantic life, despite the bigotry of the time, he married a woman in an apparently asexual relationship and had a brief affair with Oscar Wilde in 1895. After a period of intellectual inactivity, he founded a literary magazine in 1908. In 1916, when Gide was 47, he left his wife for a 15-year-old boy. They were together for 11 years and travelled through Afr...