FRENCH WRITER

MAUPASSANT

• Henri-René-Albert-Guy de Maupassant was born on August 5, 1850 at the Château de Miromesnil (Castle Miromesnil, near Dieppe in the Seine-Inférieure (now Seine-Maritime) department in France.

• He was the first son of Laure Le Poittevin and Gustave de Maupassant, both from prosperous bourgeois families. When Maupassant was 11 and his brother Hervé was five, his mother, an independent-minded woman, risked social disgrace to obtain a legal separation from her husband.

• In 1867, as he entered junior high school, Maupassant made acquaintance with Gustave Flaubert at Croisset at the insistence of his mother.[6]Next year, in autumn, he was sent to the Lycée Pierre-Corneille in Rouen[7] where he proved a good scholar indulging in poetry and taking a prominent part in theatricals.

• In October 1868, at the age of 18, he saved the famous poet Algernon Charles Swinburne from drowning off the coast of Étretat.[8]

• In 1881 he published his first volume of short stories under the title of La Maison Tellier; it reached its twelfth edition within two years.

• In 1883 he finished his first novel, Une Vie (translated into English as A Woman's Life), 25,000 copies of which were sold in less than a year.

• His second novel Bel Ami, which came out in 1885, had thirty-seven printings in four months.

• Bei Ami

• Maupassant is considered one of the fathers of the modern short story. He delighted in clever plotting, and served as a model for Somerset Maugham and O. Henry in this respect.

• His stories about expensive jewellery ("The Necklace", "La parure") are imitated with a twist by Maugham ("Mr Know-All", "A String of Beads") and Henry James ("Paste").