Maupassant, Guy de 1850-93
French novelist

Born in the Norman ch�teau of Miromesnil, near Dieppe, he was educated at Rouen and spent his life in Normandy. After a short spell as a soldier in the Franco-Prussian war he became a government clerk, but encouraged by Gustave Flaubert, a friend of his mother's, he took to writing and mingled with Zola and other disciples of Naturalism. Free from sentimentality or idealism, his stories lay bare with minute and merciless observation the pretentiousness and vulgarity of the middle class of the period and the cunning and traditional meanness of the Norman peasant. He first achieved success with Boule de suif (1880, 'Ball of Tallow'), which exposes the hypocrisy, prudery and ingratitude of the bourgeois in the face of a heroic gesture by a prostitute, and went on to write nearly 300 short stories. Le Horla (1887, Eng trans 1890) and La Peur (posthumous 1925, 'The Fear') describe madness and fear with a horrifying accuracy, foreshadowing the insanity which beset Maupassant in 1892 and finally precipitated his death. He also wrote several full-length novels, including Une Vie (1883, Eng trans A Woman's Life, 1888) and Bel-Ami (1885, Eng trans 1891).

Bibliography: F Steegmuller, Maupassant (1950)