Over a long and prolific career, he authored novels and essays, several plays, and a biography of Francis of Assisi, produced a four-volume autobiography, and for decades maintained a daily journal that he edited and published in nineteen volumes.

The posthumous publication of the unexpurgated text of his journals presented a different version of his personality and sexuality, revealed details of the lives of many of his prominent contemporaries, and documented the gay subculture of 20th-century France.

[4] Toward the end of his life Green told an interviewer that when his father's employer, Southern Cotton Oil Company, allowed him to work in Germany or France, Julien's mother urged they settle in France on the grounds that the French, having recently suffered defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, would prove sympathetic to Americans who identified with the defeated US Confederacy.

[8] His first published work in French was the Pamphlet contre les catholiques de France, which appeared under the pseudonym Théophile Delaporte.

[5] In 1938 he began publishing his journals, which he edited extensively to suppress accounts of his and others' sexual adventures and opinions he had expressed more freely in private than in public.

His memoir of childhood Memories of Happy Days was called "one of the most innately beautiful and subtly communicative books to be written by any American about France".

[18] He also translated two works by Charles Péguy into English: The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc and Basic Verities, Men and Saints.

Henri Peyre wrote of it with enthusiasm: "Strange and tense, it is nevertheless compelling, as Dostoevsky's fiction is", though he noted Green achieved this "in spite of an uncertain design and its disregard for all ordinary realism".

In the third volume, Terre lointaine (1966), he described how he became aware of his homosexuality while at the University of Virginia, experienced his first crush, and gained second-hand experience from a similarly inclined fellow student.

[21] In the fourth volume, Jeunesse (1974), he depicted himself in college: "No one was ever so petrified by a Medusa's head as I was by what struck me as a perfect young [man's] face.

[23] Green was elected to succeed to François Mauriac's chair in the Académie française on 3 June 1971,[3] the first member not a French citizen.

[25] In 1996, he caused a minor scandal by resigning from the Académie, disavowing any interest in honors and describing himself as "American, exclusively" (americain, exclusivement).

[e][3] In 1975, the Pleiade library began republishing several volumes of Green's work, an honor rarely accorded a living writer.

[1] In 1976, a collection of "articles and lecture notes" written by Green in the U.S. during World War II was published–only in English–as Memories of Evil Days.

Set during the American Civil War, a young officer's life is transformed when he encounters a handsome teenage boy.

From him the Green-Meldrim House in Savannah, the home of Green's paternal grandfather, bought a collection of furniture, ceramics, silver, family photographs, and a ledger.

Included were "hundreds of pages, with countless pornographic and vulgar passages crossed out", with as much as half the material published for the first time, sexual matters as well as assessments of colleagues and literary figures, as well as racist and anti-semitic statements.

The full text records such a variety of sexual encounters that it documents gay life in the years between the world wars.

They lived as a couple for most of the inter-war years; theirs was an open relationship and each had multiple sex partners, whom they occasionally shared.

[1][41] The third and final volume, entitled Dixie in both languages, continued the action to the autumn of 1862 and was published in both French and English versions in 1995.

[4] In France, both during his life and today, Green's reputation rests principally not on his novels, but on his journals,[citation needed] which spanned the years 1919 to 1998, and which he edited and published in nineteen volumes.

The first volume exploring "faith, love and the nature of home and memory", focused on his mother while presenting a self-portrait of "fluid contradictions", "ascetic in his aspirations but frankly alive to every sensual stimulus".

A notable exception was the memoir Memories of Happy Days (1942), which was only published posthumously in French as Souvenirs des jours heureux (2007).

[42] Le langage et son double (1985) (English title: Language and its Shadow) used a side-by-side English–French format that facilitated direct comparison.

A close examination of the texts suggests that Green adopted a different voice in each language, evidenced by "a plethora of semantic discrepancies".

[48] An opera by Kenton Cole based on Sud premiered in Marseille in 1965 and received "hostile" reviews when staged at the Opéra de Paris in 1972.