author
Alain-Fournier
1886–1914
Best known for the dreamlike classic Le Grand Meaulnes, he wrote with unusual tenderness about youth, longing, and the feeling that something beautiful has just slipped away. His literary career was brief, but the single completed novel he left behind has kept his name alive for generations of readers.
2 Audiobooks
Le Grand Meaulnes
by Alain-Fournier
Miracles avec une introduction de Jacques Rivière
by Alain-Fournier
About the author
Born Henri-Alban Fournier in La Chapelle-d'Angillon, France, in 1886, he was the son of schoolteachers and later wrote under the pen name Alain-Fournier. Scenes from his rural childhood and his sense of lost wonder would become central to his fiction.
His reputation rests mainly on Le Grand Meaulnes (1913), his only completed novel, now considered a classic of French literature. The book draws on memory, desire, and the mysteries of adolescence, blending everyday life with an almost enchanted atmosphere.
Alain-Fournier was killed in action in September 1914 during the opening months of the First World War, at only 27. That early death gave his work an added poignancy: readers often see in it not just nostalgia for youth, but for an entire vanished world.