Julian Green; U.S. Novelist Wrote in France

Julian Green, American novelist and the first foreigner to be elected to the elite 40-member Academie Francaise that serves as a watchdog over the French language, has died, French media reported. He was 97.

Green died Aug. 13 in Paris, and was buried in a private ceremony outside the country, Radio France Info and LCI television said.

The Paris-based Green, who enriched the French language with tales of the American South in a career that spanned more than six decades, was elected to the Academie in 1971. But in 1996, he made headlines by announcing that he was relinquishing his seat, saying he felt “exclusively American” and citing his advanced age, his difficulty in getting around and his deep distaste for honors.

Born in Paris to American parents, Green was the son of the representative of American cotton producers in France. His parentage and Puritan upbringing led the author to describe himself as “a Southerner lost in Europe, regardless of what I do.”

Green wrote mostly in French, but his 1982 “Memories of Happy Days” was in English. It recalled, in simple prose, the lost happiness of his childhood.

Green produced more than a dozen novels, numerous short stories, five plays, an autobiography, numerous biographies and essays, and a multivolume journal--all in French. In 1993, a Times reviewer praised a translated version of Green’s “Paris” as an “exquisitely written memoir.”

In 1985, the French publishing house Editions de la Difference made many of Green’s writings accessible to English-reading fans as well as French ones in a translation of Green by Green. “Le Langage et Son Double/The Language and Its Shadow” was a bilingual edition of essays written in English or French over 50 years.

Green was active until his late 80s, attending weekly meetings of Academie members and devoting several hours a day to his autobiography.

It was in 1987 that Green became a household name in France with his bestseller “Pays Lointain (Faraway Country),” a historical novel about the American South that he began in 1934 but abandoned because of the huge success of Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind.”

Green’s best-known works included “Sud (South),” a 1953 play about the Civil War, and “Moira” (1950), a novel about the struggle between sensuality and spirituality.

A devout Catholic who converted from Protestantism after his mother died, Green gave many of his novels a kind of Gothic atmosphere because of the subject matter: murder, suicide, sadism, madness. In his writings, he also explored his feelings about his homosexuality.

Beyond the anecdotes of his Virginian father and Georgian mother about 19th century plantation life, Green fueled his knowledge of the South in two years of study at the University of Virginia. He is survived by an adopted son, Eric.