Guy de Maupassant

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Guy de Maupassant

Born August 5, 1850(1850-08-05)
Died June 6, 1893 (aged 42)
Occupation Novelist, short story writer, poet
Nationality French
Genres Naturalism, Realism
Influences
Influenced
French literature
By category
French literary history

Medieval
16th century · 17th century
18th century · 19th century
20th century · Contemporary
French writers

Chronological list
Writers by category
Novelists · Playwrights
Poets · Essayists
Short story writers
France portal
Literature portal
This box: view • talk • edit

Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant (pronounced [gidəmopasɑ̃]) (5 August 1850 – 6 July 1893) was a popular 19th-century French writer. He is one of the fathers of the modern short story. As a protégé of Flaubert, his short stories are characterized by their economy of style and their efficient effortless dénouement. He also wrote six short novels. A number of his stories often denote the futility of war and the innocent civilians who, caught, emerge changed - many are set during the Franco-Prussian War of the 1870s.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Maupassant was most likely born at the Château de Miromesnil, near Dieppe in the Seine-Inférieure (now Seine-Maritime) department. The Maupassants were an old Lorraine family who had settled in Normandy in the middle of the 18th century. In 1846 his father had married Laure Le Poittevin. With her brother Alfred, she had been the playmate of the novelist Gustave Flaubert, who was destined to have a guiding influence on her son's life. She was a woman of no common literary accomplishments, very fond of the classics, especially Shakespeare. After separating from her husband, Le Poittevin kept her two sons, the elder Guy and younger Hervé.

Until the age of thirteen, Guy happily lived with his mother at Étretat, in the Villa des Verguies, where between the sea and the luxuriant countryside, he grew very fond of fishing and outdoor activities; he went fishing with the fishermen off the coast and spoke Norman with the peasants. At the age of 14 he ate roast monkey with Algernon Charles Swinburne, the famous poet. He was deeply devoted to his mother. As he entered junior high school, he met the great author Gustave Flaubert.

He first entered a seminary at Yvetot, but deliberately got himself expelled. From his early education he retained a marked hostility to religion. Then he was sent to the Rouen Lycée, where he proved a good scholar indulging in poetry and taking a prominent part in theatricals.

The Franco-Prussian War broke out soon after his graduation from college in 1870; he enlisted as a volunteer and fought bravely.

After the war, in 1871, he left Normandy and came to Paris where he spent ten years as a clerk in the Navy Department. During these ten tedious years his only recreation and relaxation was canoeing on the Seine on Sundays and holidays.

Gustave Flaubert took him under his protection and acted as a kind of literary guardian to him, guiding his debut in journalism and literature. At Flaubert's home he met Émile Zola and the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, as well as many of the protagonists of the realist and naturalist schools. He wrote a considerable amount of verse and short plays.

In 1878 he was transferred to the Ministry of Public Instruction and became a contributing editor of several leading newspapers such as Le Figaro, Gil Blas, Le Gaulois and l'Echo de Paris. He devoted his spare time to writing novels and short stories.

In 1880 he published his first masterpiece, "Boule de Suif", which met with an instant and tremendous success. Flaubert characterized it as "a masterpiece that will endure." This was Maupassant's first piece of short fiction set during the Franco-Prussian War, and was followed by short stories such as "Deux Amis," "Mother Savage," and "Mademoiselle Fifi."

The decade from 1880 to 1891 was the most fertile period of Maupassant's life. Made famous by his first short story, he worked methodically and produced two or sometimes four volumes annually. He combined talent and practical business sense, which made him wealthy.

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. In his novels, he concentrated all his observations scattered in his short stories. His second novel Bel-Ami, which came out in 1885, had thirty-seven printings in four months.

His editor, Havard, commissioned him to write new masterpieces and Maupassant continued to produce them without the slightest apparent effort. At this time he wrote what many consider to be his greatest novel, Pierre et Jean.

With a natural aversion to society, he loved retirement, solitude, and meditation. He traveled extensively in Algeria, Italy, England, Brittany, Sicily, Auvergne, and from each voyage he brought back a new volume. He cruised on his private yacht "Bel-Ami," named after his earlier novel. This feverish life did not prevent him from making friends among the literary celebrities of his day: Alexandre Dumas, fils had a paternal affection for him; at Aix-les-Bains he met Hippolyte Taine and fell under the spell of the philosopher-historian.

Flaubert continued to act as his literary godfather. His friendship with the Goncourts was of short duration; his frank and practical nature reacted against the ambience of gossip, scandal, duplicity, and invidious criticism that the two brothers had created around them in the guise of an 18th-century style salon.

Maupassant was but one of a fair number of 19th-century Parisians who did not care for the Eiffel tower; indeed, he often ate lunch in the restaurant at its base, not out of any preference for the food, but because it was only there that he could avoid seeing its otherwise unavoidable profile.[1] Moreover, he and forty-six other Parisian literary and artistic notables attached their names to letter of protest, ornate as it was irate, against the tower's construction to the then-Minister of Public Works.[2]

In his later years he developed a constant desire for solitude, an obsession for self-preservation, and a fear of death and crazed paranoia of persecution, that came from the syphilis he had contracted in his early days. He was considered insane in 1891 and died two years later, a month short of his 43rd birthday, on July 6, 1893.

Guy De Maupassant penned his own epitaph: "I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing."

Guy de Maupassant is buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris.

[edit] Significance

Maupassant is 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 real or fake jewels ("La Parure", "Les Bijoux") are imitated with a twist by Maugham ("Mr Know-All", "A String of Beads") and Henry James.

Taking his cue from Balzac, Maupassant wrote comfortably in both the high-Realist and fantastic modes; stories and novels such as "L'Héritage" and Bel-Ami aim to recreate Third Republic France in a realistic way, whereas many of the short stories (notably "Le Horla", cited as an inspiration for H. P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu", and "Qui sait?") describe apparently supernatural phenomena.

The supernatural in Maupassant, however, is often implicitly a symptom of the protagonists' troubled minds; Maupassant was fascinated by the burgeoning discipline of psychiatry, and attended the public lectures of Jean-Martin Charcot between 1885 and 1886 (see Pierre Bayard, Maupassant, juste avant Freud (Paris: Minuit, 1998). This interest is reflected in his fiction.

[edit] Criticism

De Maupassant is notable as the subject of one of Leo Tolstoy's essays on art: "The Works of Guy de Maupassant."

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Novels

  • Une vie (1883)
  • Bel-Ami (1885)
  • Mont-Oriol (1887)
  • Pierre et Jean (1888)
  • Fort comme la mort (1889)
  • Notre Coeur (1890)

[edit] Short story collections

[edit] Travel writing

  • "Au soleil" (1884)
  • "Sur l'eau" (1888)
  • "La Vie errante" (1890)

[edit] Poetry

  • "Des Vers" (1880)

[edit] References

  1. ^ Barthes, Roland. The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies. Tr. Howard, Richard. Berkeley:University of California Press. ISBN 978-0520209824. Page 1.
  2. ^ Harriss, Joseph. The Tallest Tower. Unlimited Publishing LLC, 2004. ISBN 1588321029. Pages 15, 16.

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
Wikisource
Wikisource has original works written by or about: