Guy de Maupassant

Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was born in Normandy in 1850 and died in Paris in 1893. He began writing at the age of thirteen and continued to work intensively until the end of his life. His body of work includes six novels, eight plays, several collections of poetry, numerous essays, articles and travelogues, and, most importantly, over three hundred short stories. Maupassant grew up in Normandy, close to nature and the people of the countryside. He was a highly intelligent boy with a keen eye for detail who enjoyed playing just as much as he enjoyed studying. When Guy wrote his first verses, his mother, thrilled, entrusted him to Flaubert, an old family friend, who became Maupassant’s spiritual father. At the age of nineteen, he began studying at the Paris Law School and was later appointed to the civil service. In 1874, at Flaubert’s home, he met Zola, who treated him with friendship and introduced him to a circle of the great artists of the time. In 1880, with Zola’s help, his short story “Gras Balou” was published, thanks to which he was recognised as a great short-story writer. He resigned from the civil service and devoted himself exclusively to writing. Maupassant suffered from serious health problems and died of syphilis in a psychiatric clinic in Paris at the age of just forty-three. In his 310 short stories, he has captured reality in all its forms, with detachment, without delving into social commentary, in a style that is simple and precise, at times light-hearted and playful, and at others bitter and bleak.