Guy de Maupassant

Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant  (August 1850 – 6 July 1893) was a 19th-century French author. Maupassant was a protégé of Gustave Flaubert. He is well-known as the representative of naturalist school. He wrote around 300 short stories and six novels.

He spent a happy childhood in Étretat, on the Normandy coast, and received his instruction from an abbot and his mother, who had a vast literary culture. Maupassant was mobilized for the 1870 war against Prussia. He then worked in Paris as a civil servant at the Ministry of the Navy for nearly ten years, then at the Ministry of Public Instruction. He devoted himself fully to writing in 1880. It was this same year that he received public recognition. In the last years of his life, Maupassant suffered from nervous disorders due to syphilis. He died at the age of 43.