Author of the Month: Guy de Maupassant

Alright, not that anyone cares but I thought I'd tell the world anyway. Starting this month, September of 2008, I will be picking an author every month and reading as many of their works (plays, prose, and poetry) during that time, even if I've read the work before. I think I'll pick a diffrent era every month.

This month I'm reading Guy de Maupassant. Here's his Wiki bio:

Guy de Maupassant(5 August 1850 – 6 July 1893) was a popular 19th-century French writer. He is one of the fathers of the modern short story. As a protégé of Flaubert, his short stories are characterized by their economy of style and their efficient effortless dénouement. He also wrote six short novels. A number of his stories often denote the futility of war and the innocent civilians who, caught, emerge changed - many are set during the Franco-Prussian War of the 1870s.

Maupassant is considered one of the fathers of the modern short story. He delighted in clever plotting, and served as a model for Somerset Maugham and O. Henry in this respect. His stories about real or fake jewels ("La Parure", "Les Bijoux") are imitated with a twist by Maugham ("Mr Know-All", "A String of Beads") and Henry James.

Taking his cue from Balzac, Maupassant wrote comfortably in both the high-Realist and fantastic modes; stories and novels such as "L'Héritage" and Bel-Ami aim to recreate Third Republic France in a realistic way, whereas many of the short stories (notably "Le Horla", cited as an inspiration for H. P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu", and "Qui sait?") describe apparently supernatural phenomena.

The supernatural in Maupassant, however, is often implicitly a symptom of the protagonists' troubled minds; Maupassant was fascinated by the burgeoning discipline of psychiatry, and attended the public lectures of Jean-Martin Charcot between 1885 and 1886.[3] This interest is reflected in his fiction.


So he's pretty much the father of the modern short story and like myself, loves a good plot twist. His works include:

Novels
Une vie (1883)
Bel-Ami (1885)
Mont-Oriol (1887)
Pierre et Jean (1888)
Fort comme la mort (1889)
Notre Coeur (1890)

Short story collections
"Les Soirées de Médan" (1880)
"La Maison Tellier" (1881)
"Mademoiselle Fifi" (1882)
"Contes de la bécasse" (1883)
"Miss Harriet" (1884)
"Les Soeurs Rondoli" (1884)
"Clair de lune" (1884) (contains "Les Bijoux")
"Yvette" (1884)
"Toine" (1885)
"Contes du jour et de la nuit" (1885) (contains "La Parure" or "The Necklace")
"Monsieur Parent" (1886)
"La petite Roque" (1886)
"Le Horla" (1887)
"Le Rosier de Madame Husson" (1888)
"La Main gauche" (1889)
"L'Inutile Beauté" (1890)

Travel writing
"Au soleil" (1884)
"Sur l'eau" (1888)
"La Vie errante" (1890)

Poetry
"Des Vers" (1880)


I guess I better get reading. ^_^ If there is any book that's really good or really bad I might to a review but otherwise I don't think I will review everything I read. Not unless there is a demand for that sort of thing.