Guy de Maupassant
1850–1893
Biography
Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893) was a French writer who lived most of his adult life in Paris and is best known as a master of the short story. He was born in Normandy, and in his twenties he worked as a clerk in government ministries, writing in his spare hours. Gustave Flaubert, the novelist, took him on as a pupil and guided his early work, teaching him to strip a story down to what mattered.
His best-known story, Boule de Suif (1880), follows a group of travellers in occupied Normandy during the Franco-Prussian War. The quarrels and hypocrisies inside the coach show how respectable society behaves under pressure. He wrote around three hundred short stories and several novels, among them Une vie (1883) and Bel-Ami (1885). His stories are known for compact plots and for endings that turn on one revealing detail, and he is usually grouped with the naturalist school, which studied people under social and physical pressures.
The site holds Boule de Suif and Le Horla. Le Horla (1887) is written as a diary by a man who becomes convinced that an invisible being has come to live with him. Read together, the two show the range of his work, from a wartime story of social hypocrisy to a psychological tale of a mind that can no longer trust what it perceives.
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Books
Boule de Suif
by Guy de Maupassant
"Boule de Suif", translated variously as "Dumpling", "Butterball", "Ball of Fat", "Ball of Lard", or "Small Ball", is a short story by the late-19th-century French writer Guy de Maupassant, first published on 15/16 April 1880. It is arguably his most famous short story and is…
Summary from Wikipedia: Boule de Suif (CC BY-SA 4.0)Le Horla
by Guy de Maupassant
The collection opens with Le Horla, the diary of a man in a quiet Norman house who becomes convinced that an invisible being lives beside him and feeds on his life. Thirteen more tales follow, of love, cruelty and country life, in Maupassant's plain and piercing style.
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.