Edmond Rostand

Edmond Rostand (1 April 1868 to 2 December 1918) was a French poet and dramatist, associated with neo-romanticism and best known for his 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac. He was born in Marseille into a wealthy and cultured Provencal family; his father was an economist, a poet and translator of Catullus, and a member of the Marseille Academy. Rostand studied literature, history and philosophy at the College Stanislas in Paris. His first play, the one-act comedy Le Gant rouge, was staged in 1888, and he published the poems Les Musardises in 1890. His romantic plays contrasted with the naturalistic theatre popular in the late nineteenth century, and his Les Romanesques of 1894 was later adapted as the 1960 musical comedy The Fantasticks. Cyrano de Bergerac was a triumph at the Theatre de la Porte Saint-Martin in December 1897. In 1901 he became the youngest writer ever elected to the Academie francaise. He moved to Cambo-les-Bains in the Basque Pyrenees for his health and died at fifty, still writing plays.