Guy de Maupassant (1850 - 1893) was a French short story writer, novelist and journalist, widely considered one of the founders of the modern short story. Working in the naturalist tradition and mentored by Gustave Flaubert, he produced roughly three hundred stories, six novels and several travel books in little more than a decade. [1] Among his best-known works are "Boule de Suif", "The Necklace" and the novel Bel-Ami. [2]
Early life and education
Henry René Albert Guy de Maupassant was born on 5 August 1850 near Dieppe in Normandy. His parents separated when he was a boy, and he was raised largely by his mother, Laure Le Poittevin, a childhood friend of Gustave Flaubert. The Norman countryside and coast of his youth supplied settings for much of his fiction. [1]
He was sent to a seminary at Yvetot, from which he was expelled, and completed his schooling at the Lycée Pierre-Corneille in Rouen before studying in Paris. His legal studies were interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, in which he served and which left him with the material for some of his sharpest stories. [2]
Clerk, apprentice, writer
After the war Maupassant worked for a decade as a clerk in the naval ministry and then the ministry of public instruction, writing in his spare time. Flaubert took charge of his literary education, subjecting his drafts to severe criticism and introducing him to Émile Zola, Ivan Turgenev and the writers of the naturalist circle. [1]
His breakthrough came in 1880 with "Boule de Suif", a story of hypocrisy among French travellers fleeing the Prussian advance, published in the collective volume Les Soirées de Médan. Flaubert called it a masterpiece, and its success allowed Maupassant to leave the civil service and write full time. [3]
Major work
Over the following ten years he published prolifically in newspapers and in collections such as La Maison Tellier and Contes de la bécasse. His stories treat Norman peasants, Parisian clerks, prostitutes and the provincial bourgeoisie with detachment and a refusal to moralise; "The Necklace" and "Mademoiselle Fifi" are among the most widely anthologised. [2]
His novels include Une Vie (1883), the story of a woman's disillusionment, Bel-Ami (1885), a study of a ruthless journalist's ascent through Parisian society and the press, and Pierre et Jean (1888), whose preface sets out his views on the novel. He also wrote travel narratives drawn from voyages on his yacht in the Mediterranean and North Africa. [1]
Illness and death
Maupassant had contracted syphilis as a young man, and from the mid-1880s his health deteriorated, bringing severe headaches, failing eyesight and hallucinations. This period produced increasingly disturbing stories of madness and the supernatural, most famously "Le Horla". [2]
After a suicide attempt in January 1892 he was committed to a private asylum in Paris, where he died on 6 July 1893 at the age of forty-two. He is buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery. [1]
Legacy
Maupassant's compression, objectivity and use of the sudden revealing incident shaped the short story as a form and influenced writers including Anton Chekhov, O. Henry, Somerset Maugham and Isaac Babel. His stories have been adapted repeatedly for film, among them John Ford's Stagecoach, which drew on "Boule de Suif". [3]
