René Maran (5 November 1887 – 9 May 1960) was a French poet and novelist, and the first black writer to win the French Prix Goncourt (in 1921).

Biography

Maran was born on the boat carrying his parents to Fort-de-France, Martinique where he lived until the age of seven. After that he went to Gabon, where his father Héménéglide Maran was in the colonial service. After attending boarding school in Bordeaux, France, he joined the French Colonial service in French Equatorial Africa. It was his experience there that was the basis for many of his novels, including Batouala: A True Black Novel, which won the Prix Goncourt. W. E. B. Du Bois applauded Maran, saying of his writings in an article which would be incorporated into the pivotal Harlem Renaissance text The New Negro, "Maran's attack on France and on the black French deputy from Senegal has gone into the courts and marks an era. Never before have Negroes criticized the work of the French in Africa." Since the 1920s he was active in the French anticolonialist movement and supportive of organisations like the Ligue universelle de défense de la race noire or the Comité de défense de la race noire. Jean-Paul Sartre alluded to Maran in his preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, mocking the French establishment's complacent self-congratulation that they had "on one occasion given the Prix Goncourt to a Negro". His novel Un Homme pareil aux autres is the subject of extensive analysis in the third chapter of Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks.

Tribute

On 5 November 2019 Google celebrated his 132nd birthday with a Google Doodle.

Selected works