Guy de Maupassant

Henri Rene Albert Guy de Maupassant was a nineteenth-century French author, celebrated as a master of the short story and associated with the naturalist school of thought. His fiction depicts human lives, destinies and social forces in a disillusioned and often pessimistic light. Born in 1850 and dying in 1893, he wrote his best-known work in the span of little more than a decade. He was a protege of Gustave Flaubert, and his stories are characterized by economy of style and efficient, seemingly effortless endings. Many are set during the Franco-Prussian War of the 1870s and describe the futility of war and the innocent civilians who are permanently changed by events beyond their control. He wrote three hundred short stories and six novels.