Guy de Maupassant

Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893) was a French writer, the master of the short story. Born in Normandy, he served in the war of 1870, worked as a government clerk in Paris and learned his craft under the eye of Flaubert, his mother's friend. Boule de Suif, published in 1880, made his name, and in the next decade he wrote some three hundred stories, among them The Necklace and Le Horla, and six novels, including Une Vie, Bel-Ami and Pierre et Jean. Syphilis destroyed his mind; he attempted suicide in 1892 and died in an asylum at Passy the following year, aged forty-two.