In the 1930s Mauriac wrote some minor dramas and polemical works condemning totalitarianism in all forms. La fin de la nuit (1935) brings Therese Desqueyroux to the brink of salvation, and another major novel, La pharisienne (A Woman of the Pharisees), was published in 1941 concerning a hypocritically religious woman and the evil effects she has on others. The next year he was elected to the French Academy at the relatively early age of 48. It is a story of impure human love wherein sinful creatures struggle to find grace.

What may be Mauriac's masterpiece, Le noeud de vipers (Vipers Tangle), came out in 1932. Among those which served to establish his reputation as a novelist were La chair et le sang (Flesh and Blood) in 1922 Le baiser au lepreux, a story of a destructive yearning for love in 1923, Genetrix, about the evil effects of possessive maternal love in 1925, Le desert de l'amour (The Desert of Love), wherein a father and son vie for the attentions of the same, unvirtuous, woman in 1927, Therese Desqueyroux (Therese), about a sinful woman who shares mankind's common guilt. Beginning in 1920, Mauriac published almost a novel a year for two decades (in all, he authored nearly 100 volumes). In 1914 he published La robe pr étexte (The Stuff of Youth) but did little other writing until well after World War I, in which he served in a medical unit. A second book of poetry followed two years later and then, in 1913, L'enfant charg é de chaines (Young Man in Chains), Mauriac's first novel, appeared. In November 1909 Mauriac privately published his first work, a collection of poems ( Les Mains jointes ), that gained favorable notice from influential critics. Upon leaving secondary school in the region of his birth, Mauriac went to Paris (1906) to study paleography and medieval archeology. As a child, Mauriac was frail and shy, admittedly guilt ridden, unhappy, and introverted. His father died when he was 18 months old and he was raised by his pious mother, who appears as Mme. Mauriac was the youngest of five children in what can be termed a landed, prosperous, middle-class family. Mauriac wrote two dozen works of fiction, and also achieved distinction as a political essayist, critic, biographer and writer of spiritual works.

La fin de la nuit françois mauriac