ANOUILH (Jean). - Lot 19

ANOUILH (Jean). Born in Bordeaux. 1910–1987. French playwright. Handwritten letter “Jean Anouilh” to “Madame” [Madame Brulé]. No place, [April 6, 1944]. 1 page, in-4. Enclosed envelope with postmarks. Anouilh decides not to rent Madame Brulé’s house, fearing loneliness and difficulties with supplies: …I wanted to tell you that my fears are overwhelming and that I am declining to rent your house in Roconval. It would have been nothing short of a miracle for it to remain vacant for more than a month and a half; I would certainly have found it occupied by May. I also fear a bit the loneliness and the difficulties in getting supplies for my wife when I return to Paris… Jean Anouilh was a French writer and the author of numerous plays, the most famous of which is *Antigone*, a modern reinterpretation of Sophocles’ play. It was in 1923 that his love for the theater first emerged at the Lycée Chaptal. After earning his baccalaureate, Anouilh began studying law in Paris, but dropped out after eighteen months. In 1928, two pivotal literary encounters took place: Giraudoux’s *Siegfried* and Cocteau’s *Les Mariés de la tour Eiffel*. At age 22, Anouilh became Louis Jouvet’s secretary at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. In 1929, he staged his first play, *Humulus le muet*, which was a failure. But in 1932, he wrote his first “real play”: *L’Hermine*. He then decided to make a living as a writer, but his early years were difficult. He achieved his first major success in 1937 with *Le voyageur sans bagage* at the Théâtre des Mathurins. The author almost always explores the same themes: rebellion against wealth and privilege of birth, rejection of a world based on hypocrisy and lies, the desire for the absolute, nostalgia for the lost paradise of childhood, the impossibility of love, and the ultimate end in death.