Gerard Reve

Born Gerard Kornelis van het Reve in Amsterdam on December 14, 1923, to Gerard van het Reve, a textile worker turned communist journalist, and Janetta Jacoba Doornbusch, he grew up in a strict, atheist household; he later invented a fictional descent from Baltic Russian refugees, quietly discarding the ordinary truth of his own family. He attended the Vossius Gymnasium until 1940 and trained as a typographer at Amsterdam's graphic arts school, then worked as a reporter for the newspaper Het Parool. In November 1947, under the pseudonym Simon van het Reve, he published De Avonden, ten cold December nights in the life of a bored young Amsterdam clerk that would later be voted the finest Dutch novel of the twentieth century, though its icy detachment split critics on first appearance. He moved to London in 1953, chasing an international readership, and wrote two books, including The Acrobat and Other Stories (1956), directly in English, before deciding his voice was too Dutch to travel and going home. Through the 1960s his epistolary novels On My Way to the End (1963) and Nearer to Thee (1966) made him one of the first openly gay public figures in the Netherlands and, alongside a passage describing lovemaking with God incarnated as a donkey, drew a blasphemy prosecution that the Supreme Court dismissed in 1968. He converted to Roman Catholicism the same year, folding a genuine and unorthodox faith into a life of open relationships and provocation, and shortened his name to Gerard Reve in 1973. Recognition followed: the P.C. Hooft Prize in 1969 and, in 2001, the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren, the highest honor in Dutch-language literature, though controversy over his partner kept Belgium's king from presenting it in person. With Willem Frederik Hermans and Harry Mulisch he formed the "Great Three" of postwar Dutch letters. Alzheimer's disease overtook his final years in Zulte, Belgium, where he died on April 8, 2006, at eighty-two.

In 1966, prosecutors summoned Reve to defend Nader tot U, in which his narrator makes love to God embodied as a grey donkey. Under oath, he called the donkey the sweetest, most blameless creature he knew, insisting the union was reverent, not obscene. Two years later, the Dutch Supreme Court acquitted him, quietly dissolving the country's blasphemy law.