Guy de Maupassant

From Philosopedia

Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant (5 August 1950 - 6 July 1893)

Maupassant was born at the Château de Miromesnil, near Dieppe in the Seine-Maritime department of France. After fighting in the Franco-German War, Maupassant began writing short stories. Considered a master of the genre, Maupassant wrote more than 300 short stories, as well as novels and travel books.

He was a colleague of Gustave Flaubert, Emile Zola, Ivan Turgenev and Henry James. One of his most famous short stories, "Ball of Fat" (1880), was said to have inspired a plotline in John Ford's "Stagecoach" (1939), about the hypocritical treatment of a prostitute by travelers.

Many of his stories have been adapted as movies in France. Among his 39 horror stories is "The Inn," a predecessor to Stephen King's The Shining, involving a plot about madness afflicting an isolated mountain caretaker.

Freethought biographer Joseph McCabe noted:

• His works sufficiently reflect his disdain of religion.

Maupassant was described by Corliss Lamont as a humanist, a naturalist, an author who is an exemplar of French psychological realism.

Before going mad in 1891, Maupassant wrote prodigiously about characters that were unhappy victims of their greed, their desire, their vanity. But he describes the sordidness without sermonizing. Although his short stories are masterpieces and include “The Necklace,” “The Piece of String,” and “Mlle. Fifi,” he is also known for A Life (1883), Bel-Ami (1885), and Pierre and Jean (1880), the latter a study of adultery between a wife and two brothers - Luis Bunuel turned it into a 1951 movie.

In his latter years he developed an exaggerated love for solitude, a predilection for self-preservation, and a constant fear of death and mania of persecution, compounded by the syphilis he had contracted in his early days. He was considered insane in 1891 and died two years later, a month short of his 43rd birthday, on July 6, 1893.

Guy de Maupassant is buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris.

{CE; CL; FFRF; JMR; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD}