Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893) was a French writer from Normandy, a protégé of Flaubert and a member of Zola's naturalist circle, who published some three hundred short stories and six novels, including Bel-Ami, in little more than a decade. He served in the Franco-Prussian War and worked as a ministry clerk before 'Boule de Suif' made him famous in 1880. He contracted syphilis in his twenties; after a suicide attempt in January 1892 he was confined in Dr Émile Blanche's clinic in Passy, where he died in 1893.
Maupassant's stories, written mostly between 1880 and 1890, are compact, ironic and often brutal studies of French life: Norman peasants, Parisian clerks, prostitutes, bourgeois families, soldiers and the provincial gentry. This selection gathers many of the best known, which typically include the following.
