Marguerite Duras was the artistic name of Marguerite Donnadieu that was born in

1914, April the fourth, next to Saigon, in the French Indochina (what today is South
Vietnam) and died in 1996, March the third in Paris.
Duras spent most of her childhood in Indochina, but after her fathers death, when
she was just four years old, his family started having financial difficulties so, Marguerite
and her four brothers, grew like vagabonds in the forest, almost acquiring a native look,
fighting against hunger.
Her mother discovered the strange beauty of her daughter, that even being different
had her own personal way of doing things and really fascinated men so the mother took
advantage of this. Marguerite Duras met her Chinese lover living a obsessive relationship.
When she was 17, she moved to France to study at the University of Paris, Sorbonne,
where she received licences in law and politics. For a long time, she defended leftist
causes and for 10 years was a member of the Communist Party. At the age of 28 in 1942,
she began writing.
At first, publishers didnt accept her books, she even threatened with committing
suicide if they weren't published.
In 1943 she joined the frenc Resistance and in 1944 the Gestapo arrested her
husband. She decide to stop writing for good.
However, in 1950, her third novel was published and became her first success, with
the title Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, it was quite autobiographical, about a poor French
family in Indochina. Year after year, her writing became more lyrical and complex and more
given to dialogue, what led Duras to produce screenplays, adaptations of her own novels
and short stories. Some of them ended becoming movies.
Her stories, are usually a novelistic reflection of what really happened to thousands
of human beings during the twentieth century. Marguerite offers us a description of several
crucial world so reliable as that of any good historian. Her captivating way of facing her
world and her past is inside every book she wrote.