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Biographical Notes

JEAN GIONO (1895–1970) was born and lived most of his life in the town of Manosque, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. Largely self-educated, he started working as a bank clerk at the age of sixteen and reported for military service when World War I broke out. He saw action in several battles, including Verdun, and was one of only two members of his company to survive. After the war, he returned to his job and family in Manosque and became a vocal, lifelong pacifist. After the success of his first novel, Hill, which won the Prix Brentano, he left the bank and began to publish prolifically. During World War II, Giono’s outspoken pacifism led some to accuse him, unjustly, of defeatism and of collaboration with the Nazis; after France’s liberation in 1944, he was imprisoned and held without charges. Despite being blacklisted, Giono continued writing and achieved renewed success. He was elected to the Académie Goncourt in 1954.

ALYSON WATERS has translated works by Albert Cossery, Louis Aragon, René Belletto, and others. She teaches literary translation in the French department of Yale University and is the managing editor of Yale French Studies. For NYRB Classics, Waters has translated Emmanuel Bove’s Henri Duchemin and His Shadows.

SUSAN STEWART is a poet, critic, and translator and the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. A former MacArthur Fellow and Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she is the author of six books of poems, including Columbarium and, most recently, Cinder: New and Selected Poems. Her study The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture is forthcoming in the fall of 2019.

OTHER BOOKS BY JEAN GIONO
PUBLISHED BY NYRB CLASSICS

Hill

Translated by Paul Eprile

Introduction by David Abram

Melville

Translated by Paul Eprile

Introduction by Edmund White

Title Page

A KING ALONE

JEAN GIONO

Translated from the French by

ALYSON WATERS

Introduction by

SUSAN STEWART

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

INTRODUCTION

ONE SUMMER evening at the turn of the millennium, by the edge of a field near Roussillon, an elderly farmer told me that after the devastation of World War I the local villagers replanted their truffle oaks, knowing they would have to wait at least twenty years for a harvest. But after the devastation of World War II, they despaired of planning and planting, and returned to foraging in the forests with their dogs.