Influenced by thinkers including Henri Bergson, Georg Simmel and Friedrich Nietzsche, Du Bos was well-known as a literary critic in France in the 1920s and 1930s.

Alongside Gide and the American novelist Edith Wharton, he was involved in providing aid to Belgian refugees in Paris following the 1914 German invasion of Belgium.

Raised Catholic, Du Bos lost his faith as a young man, then regained it in 1927, and regarded this conversion as the central event of his life.

[2][3] He was schooled at the Catholic Collège Gerson,[3] then attended the Lycée Janson de Sailly from 1895 and Balliol College, Oxford in 1901 and 1902.

[4] Du Bos then spent time in Berlin in 1904 and 1905, where he stayed with Reinhold and Sabine Lepsius and became friends with Max Liebermann, Ernst Robert Curtius and Bernard Groethuysen.

[4] While in Germany Du Bos arrived at a set of beliefs about religion and its relation to art to which he would adhere for the following quarter of a century.

[11] From 1914 to 1916 he and Gide were part of the Foyer Franco-Belge, in which capacity they worked to find employment, food and housing for Franco-Belgian refugees who arrived in Paris following the German invasion of Belgium.

[3] He was later asked to resign from his administrative role in the Foyer by Wharton and, when he declined, was relieved of his power to issue financial grants.

[31] The primary influence on Du Bos' early thought was Henri Bergson, whose work he first encountered in 1899, when he was introduced to Time and Free Will.

[33] Du Bos developed an account of the tragic that drew on Friedrich Nietzsche, Anton Chekhov, and his friend Jacques Maritain.

[1] The critical method of the book involves an exploration of an author's identity informed by readings of repetitions in their work.

[37] Du Bos reads Flaubert's novella November to describe the author as "all pulp, without a core, without resistance", as characterised by a fascination by human stupidity, and as coarsely vulgar.

[40] In the essay "On Physical Suffering" he drew on his own experience of illness to describe the body as "sometimes the shining ray of the glory of Creation, and sometimes the enigmatic instrument of torture charged with following here below the work of the Cross.

[44] In his 1927 journals, Du Bos complained of feeling bored and oppressed by the necessity of composing Dialogue avec André Gide.

"[11] What Is Literature?, a collection of four lectures on Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats delivered at the University of Notre Dame in 1938, was published in 1940.

[1] Returning to Keats, an early interest, he argues the poet was unique in successfully balancing the needs of the abstract and the concrete.

[45] Responding to the question posed by the title, Du Bos defines literature as "life becoming conscious of itself when, in the soul of a man of genius, it joins its plenitude of expression.

[9] In 1938 Du Bos began writing a series of diary entries discussing European politics, and especially the Munich Agreement, in personal and ethical terms.

[41] One essay describes Goethe's experiences as a student, while others relate to the religious crisis he experienced around the death of Susanne von Klettenberg and his relationship with Lili Schönemann.

[9] Du Bos' work influenced later European writers including Albert Béguin, Georges Poulet and Jean Starobinski.