Guy de Maupassant

Guy de Maupassant was a French writer born on 5 August 1850 at Tourville-sur-Arques in Normandy. He grew up in the Norman countryside, studied briefly in Paris, and served in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, an experience that shaped much of his later fiction. He then worked as a clerk in government ministries while learning his craft under the guidance of Gustave Flaubert, a family friend. His story Boule de Suif brought him fame in 1880, and over the following decade he produced some three hundred short stories, six novels and travel writing. His tales are lean, ironic and precise, set among peasants, clerks, soldiers, prostitutes and the Parisian middle class, and they often turn on greed, vanity and chance. He is considered a master of the modern short story and a leading figure of French realism and naturalism. His health declined in his final years, and he died in Paris on 6 July 1893, aged forty-two.