South Vietnamese-French author of over 70 books plus plays and cinema adaptations. She was representative of the ‘nouveau woman;’ scenarist, playwright, and film director, internationally known for her screenplays of “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” directed by Alain Resnais in 1959, and “India Song,” (play 1973, screen 1975). Her works were equally loved and hated, with her first noted book released in 1950, “The Sea Wall.”
She was never elected into the Goncourt as “we don’t give the Goncourt to a communist writer.”
Duras’ father died when she was four, and her mother, a teacher, struggled hard to bring up three children. She spent most of her childhood in Indochina, and at 17 she moved to France, where she studied law at the Sorbonne. Duras took her penname from the name of a village in France near where her father had owned property.
From 1935 to 1941 Duras worked at the ministry of colonies. She published her first book, “Les Impudents” in 1942, patterned in a style influenced by Hemingway. During World War II she was a member of French resistance; she had also joined the Communist Party, but later condemned its policies. After the war she worked as a journalist for the magazine Observateur.
Duras married Robert Antelme on 23 September 1939. Robert was a member of the resistance group Richelieu, led by François Mitterand. In 1943 she met Mitterand, starting a long friendship and unquestioning love. Robert was captured by the Gestapo, but survived Buchenwald, Gandersheim, and Dachau, and wrote his memoirs, “L’espèce Humaine.” He was nursed by Duras, who had already planned to leave him but waited for his recovery, to marry the man who would be the father of her child. She divorced Robert on 24 April 1947, the year she had a son by Dionys Mascolo. This period was the basis for Duras’s later collection of short stories, entitled “La Douleur,” 1985.
From 1980 she lived with a 40-year younger companion, Yann Andrea Steiner. Duras’s struggle with her alcoholism was a subject for Yann Andréa Steiner’s book.
It was said that Duras didn’t die, she just kept silent, “c’est tout” (that’s all), on 3 March 1996 in the morning, in Paris.
Link to Wikipedia biography