short story author profiles

Guy de Maupassant

Maupassant was born in Normandy, France in 1850. His mother was a friend of Flaubert, who became Maupassant’s teacher in prose.

In 1880 his first story, Boule de Suif was published which Flaubert characterized as “a masterpiece that will endure.” In 1881 he published his first volume of short stories under the title of La Maison Tellier which reached its 12th edition in two years.

On the publication of his first short story he left his job in the Civil Service and became a prolific writer, publishing dozens of articles, nearly three thousand stories and six novels in the next eleven years. His best known novels are A Woman’s Life, Bel-Ami and Pierre and Jean.

Maupassant travelled extensively during his life and visited Algeria, Italy, England and Sicily. He had his own yacht named Bel-Ami.

In the 1870s he contracted syphilis and attempted suicide in 1891. He was committed to an asylum in Paris where he died two years later.

Maupassant is considered to be one of the fathers of the modern short story and has been named as a role model for many authors, including Somerset Maugham and O. Henry.

(Submitted by FelicityJ)

Helen Simpson

Helen Simpson was born in Bristol in 1959 and grew up in London. She gained an English degree at Oxford University and worked for five years as a staff writer at Vogue magazine before becoming a freelance writer.

Her first collection of short stories Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Other Stories was published in 1990. This novel won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, a Somerset Maugham Award and was chosen as one of Granta Magazine’s 20 Best Young British Novelists in 1993. Her second collection of short stories was Dear George published in 1995. Her third collection, Hey Yeah Right Get a Life, published in 2000 won the Hawthorden Prize in 2001. In 2002 the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded Simpson the E.M Forster Award.

Her latest collection of stories Constitutional was published in 2005 and In the Driver’s Seat in 2007. Helen Simpson now lives in London.

(Submitted by Sonia)

Somerset Maugham

William Somerset Maugham was born in Paris in 1874. He was the youngest son of the solicitor to the British Embassy. When he was ten Maugham was sent to England to live with his uncle as both his parents had died. He was educated at the Kings’ School, Canterbury and Heidelberg University. He qualified as a doctor in 1897 at St Thomas’ Medical School in London.

Maugham gave up his medical career and moved to Paris in 1897 where he stayed for ten years. His first novel Liza of Lambeth was published in 1897. His first play A Man of Honour was produced in 1903. Four of his plays ran simultaneously in London in 1904. His semi-autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage was published in 1915.

During the First World War he served as an espionage agent for the British Secret Intelligence Service in Russia in 1916 to 1917. He then set off travelling to Eastern Asia, the Pacific Islands and Mexico. He used experiences of his travels in the Pacific in his novel Trembling of a Leaf published in 1921. The Moon and Sixpence (1919).

told the story of an artist Charles Strickland and was based on Paul Gauguin.

In 1928 he moved to Cape Ferrat in France. His plays The Circle (1921), Our Betters (1923) and The Constant Wife (1927) were performed both in Europe and the U.S.

During World War Two he lived in Hollywood where he worked on a screen adaptation of his novel Razors’ Edge. (1944).

Many critics believe that Maugham wrote the first modern spy story with Ashenden: Or the British Agent (1928) a collection of six stories set in Switzerland, France, Russia and Italy and based on Maughams’ own experiences.

Maugham wrote of his literary experiences in The Summing Up (1938) which has been used as a guidebook for creative writing. He wrote in this book that “The ordinary is the writers’ richest field.” To celebrate Maugham’s 80th birthday Cakes and Ale, a novel about the London literary circles was re-published.

Somerset Maugham died in Nice in 1965.

(Submitted by Dorothy)

Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer was born in 1923 just outside Johannesburg in South Africa. She was largely educated at home and began writing short stories with her first being published in 1937 at the age of fifteen. She studied for a year at the University of the Witwatersrand but left before completing her degree and moved to Johannesburg in 1948.

Many of her early stories were published in the collection, Face to Face published in 1949. In 1951 her story, A Watcher of the Dead, was accepted by the New Yorker magazine and Gordimer has since had many more stories published by the magazine. She has said that she believes the short story is the literary form for our age.

After the arrest of her best friend, Bettie du Toit in 1960, and the Sharpeville Massacre, Gordimer entered the anti-arpartheid movement. She became active in South African politics and was close friends with Nelson Mandela’s defence lawyers during his trial of 1962. The South African Government of the time banned several of her novels and she joined the African national Congress when it was still an illegal organization. She hid ANC leaders in her house and took part in anti-arpartheid demonstrations.

Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for A Guest of Honour in 1971 and the Booker Prize for her 1974 novel The Conservationist.

Gordimer has demonstrated against censorship and state control and has been active in South African literary organizations. She is a founding member of the Congress of South African Writers and has been Vice President of International Pen.

Her latest novel, Get a Life ( 2005 ), written after the death of her husband, is the story of a man undergoing treatment for a life threatening disease. The novel also continues her interest in political themes as the main character is an ecologist battling the installation of a planned nuclear plant.

(Submitted by Bernie).

Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield was born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1888 and went to Wellington Girls’ High School and Queen’s College, London.

After an unhappy marriage to George Bowden she travelled to Bavaria where she wrote her first collection of stories In a German Pension (1911) which proved to be both a critical and commercial success.

She returned to London in 1910 and met John Middleton Murray who she married in 1918. In this year she discovered she had tuberculosis and was forced to spend part of each year in the South of France and Switzerland, in her fight against the illness.

A perfectionist, she worked obsessively and to the point of exhaustion. Her family memoirs were contained in Bliss and other stories (1920) which secured her reputation as an original and innovative writer. In the next two years she wrote her best work, The Garden Party (1922) being published in the year she entered the Gurdjieff institute, Fontainbleau, where she died aged thirty four. The Dove’s Nest and Something Childish were published posthumously.

Mansfield was greatly influenced by Chekhov sharing his attention to small details of human

behaviour and was a prolific short story writer.

(Submitted by Clara)

Alice Munro

Alice Munro was born in Wingham, Ontario, Canada in 1931 and grew up on a farm. She went to the University of Western Ontario, married James Munro in 1951 and had three daughters. In 1972 she divorced her first husband and became Writer in Residence at the University of Western Ontario. In 1976 she re-married and from 1979 to 1982 toured Australia, Scandanavia and China. In 1980 she held the position of Writer in Residence at both the University of British Columbia and the University of Queensland.

At the age of eighteen Munro sold her first story to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Her first collection of stories Dance of the Happy Shades (1968 ) won the Governor General’s Award, as did her next, Lives of Girls and Women (1971 ). Who do you Think you Are, a series of interlinked stories was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1980 and was awarded the Governor General’s Award. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s she published a short story collection about once every four years. Her stories appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review and The Atlantic Monthly. Her newest collection of stories, Too Much Happiness is due to be published in October 2009.

The author was described by The Washington Post as “…a born teller of tales who can transform the anecdotal or apparently digressive into a rich parable of life in our fickle times”.

Much of Munro’s work is set in South-Western Ontario and the Canadian Pacific North-West. The stories have a strong regional focus and the characters often confront deep rooted customs and traditions. Her work has been compared with other great short story writers. The American author Cynthia Oziok called her “Our Chekhov”, saying that Munro shares Chekhov’s obsession with the passing of time and the inability to delay or prevent its movement ever onwards. As in Chekhov’s stories, the plot is secondary and little happens. The stories focus on the human condition and relationships through the lens of daily life. Her stories display clear and concise language and attention to detail and many critics have said that they have the emotional and literary depth of novels. She has spoken of her desire to write a novel; “I’m always trying. Between every book I think, well now, it’s time to get down to the serious stuff.”

Munro is the winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her literary body of work. Jane Smiley, author and one of the judges of this prize said; “Her work is practically perfect. Any writer has to gawk when reading her because her work is very subtle and precise. Her thoughtfulness about every subject is so concentrated”. Smiley also said that Munro managed to do more in the thirty pages of her short stories than some novelists do in an entire book. Her fellow judge, novelist and critic Amit Chaudhuri said; “Her commitment to the story as a form is very impressive. Lesser writers would have produced a good or mediocre novel, or three or four, over the years. The fact she decided this is what she was going to explore is very impressive, especially in the Anglo writing world, which is inimical to the shorter form”.

Alice Munro now lives in Clinton, Ontario with her second husband, Gerald Fremlin.

(Submitted by AngelinaS)