Guy de Maupassant, the French writer, was the author of many celebrated stories, novels, and novellas. He was born at the chateau of Miromesnil near Dieppe, in the department of Seine-Maritime. His father, Gustave de Maupassant, came of an aristocratic Lorraine family long settled in Normandy; he married Laure Le Poittevin, a girl from a bourgeois family. Maupassant himself enjoyed excellent health from childhood, though his mother, a friend of Flaubert's, was tormented by neuroses all her life, and his younger brother, a doctor by profession, died in an asylum for the insane.
After a college kept by the clergy, Maupassant moved to the lycee at Rouen, where he finished his schooling. He went through the Franco-Prussian campaign as a common soldier, then filled out his education by reading, developing a particular passion for natural science and astronomy. To keep at bay the hereditary illness that hung over him, he worked hard at his physical fitness. The ruin that overtook his family forced him into a clerkship at the Ministry of the Navy, where he spent some ten years.
Literature was his true pull. For more than six years Maupassant, who had grown close to Flaubert, wrote, rewrote, and tore up what he had written; he ventured into print only when Flaubert judged the work sufficiently mature and stylistically whole. His first story appeared in 1880, alongside pieces by Zola, Alexis, Ceard, Hennique, and Huysmans, in the collection Les Soirees de Medan. Success came quickly and on a large scale; he brought his earnings up to sixty thousand francs a year and considered it his duty to support his mother and his brother's family.
The mental strain soon told on his health. From 1884 he suffered nervous attacks; as disillusionment and hypochondria deepened, he sank into a restless idealism, tormented by the need to find an answer to what eludes the senses. In December 1891 the attacks drove him to attempt suicide. In an asylum near Passy he at first regained consciousness, but the seizures returned ever more often, and death came from progressive paralysis of the brain. Maupassant died in Paris in 1893.