REVE, GERARD KORNELIS VAN HET

(1923–2006)

Writer, born into a Communist family. Gerard Reve (his author’s name since 1973; he started writing as Simon van het Reve) wrote one of the classics in Dutch 20th-century literature: De avonden [The Evenings, 1947] and published many other books, including Op weg naar het einde [Approaching the End, 1963], Lieve jongens [Dear Boys, 1973], and Brieven aan Josine M. [Letters to Josine M., 1981]. De avonden deals with narrow-mindedness and people’s scared and op pressive existence. After his journey to an author’s conference of in ternational writers organization PEN in Edinburgh in 1962, Reve also started writing books in letter form. He was one of the first public ho mosexuals in Dutch society. In 1966, Reve paradoxically converted to Roman Catholicism. He also caused several scandals. In 1966, for instance, he was sent to court because he had written about “his” sexual intercourse with a donkey who was God, in his book Nader tot U [Nearer to Thee, 1966]; two years later, he was cleared of this charge. In 1969, he kissed the minister of social work, Marga Klompe, after she awarded him the prestigious P. C. Hooft Prize for literature. Such acts were still uncommon in those days. His work was still controversial in the 1980s. The Stichting Collectieve Propa ganda van het Nederlandse Boek (Dutch Book Propaganda Founda tion) refused, for example, Reve’s book De vierde man [The Fourth Man, 1981; turned into a film by director Paul Verhoeven (1938– )] as a giveaway during the Dutch book week. Nevertheless, many peo ple have admired Reve’s books, and he has begun to receive recog nition. In 2001, Reve received the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren, the most important literary prize of Belgium and the Netherlands, which is awarded by the Nederlandse Taalunie (Dutch Language Union) every three years. He is a brother of the Slavist Prof. Karel van het Reve (1921–1999), who assisted Russian dissident Andrei Sakharov in smuggling his work out of the Soviet Union.

See also Dutch language and literature.