Jules Romains

Jules Romains (1885-1972), nom de plume of Louis Farigoule, was a poet, playwright, essayist, critic, and novelist. As a young university student, Romains wrote the manifesto “Poetry and Unanimous Feelings” (translated here) and the book length poem La vie unanime. He was associated with a writers commune (the Abbaye de Créteil), and in contact with Gide, Apollinaire, Max Jacob, and cubist painter and theorist Albert Gleizes, among others. Romains’s once popular 27-volume novel, Les hommes de bonne volonté (published 1932-1946), begins in October 1908 on the day Austria announced its intentions to annex Bosnia-Herzegovina, which lead to WWI and ends in 1933. Romains lived in the USA during WWII; he returned to France in 1946. Some critics today consider Romains’s concept of unanimism to be as significant to early modernism as was futurism and cubism.