Guy de Maupassant
Guy de Maupassant was an acclaimed French short story writer and novelist.
Henri-René-Albert-Guy de Maupassant was born on August 5, 1850 at the Château de Miromesnil near Tourville-sur-Arques in the Normandy region of France, to minor nobility whose marriage soon collapsed. He grew up under his mother Laure Le Poittevin's care, in a household close to Gustave Flaubert, who had been Laure's brother's friend and who became Maupassant's literary mentor. He attended a seminary at Yvetot, was expelled, and finished school at the Lycée Pierre-Corneille in Rouen.
He served as a soldier in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and afterward worked for ten years as a clerk at the Ministry of the Marine and then the Ministry of Public Instruction in Paris. Flaubert directed his literary apprenticeship strictly through the 1870s, refusing to let him publish until he was ready. The story "Boule de Suif" appeared in the 1880 collection Les Soirées de Médan, edited by Émile Zola, and made him famous overnight.
He left government service and over the following decade produced roughly three hundred short stories and six novels, including Une Vie (1883), Bel-Ami (1885), Pierre et Jean (1888), and the often-anthologized tales "La Parure" ("The Necklace"), "La Maison Tellier," and "Le Horla." He set most of his work in Normandy, in the petty-bourgeois ministries of Paris, or in the world of journalists and parvenus he knew at first hand.
He had contracted syphilis in his early twenties and the disease's neurological stage caught up with him in the late 1880s. He attempted suicide on January 2, 1892, was committed to Dr. Blanche's clinic at Passy, and died there on July 6, 1893, aged forty-two.
The name Guy comes from the Old French form of the Germanic root wid ("wood"), reaching Latin as Wido and Guido. He carried it as a masculine given name common among the French nobility and middle class of the nineteenth century.