Authors' Biography

1. Guy de Maupassant
Henri-René-Albert-Guy de Maupassant was born on 5 August 1850 at the late
16th-century Château de Miromesnil, near Dieppe in the Seine-Inférieure (now Seine-
Maritime) department in France. He was the first son of Laure Le Poittevin and Gustave
de Maupassant, both from prosperous bourgeois families. His mother urged his father
when they married in 1846 to obtain the right to use the particule or form "de
Maupassant" instead of "Maupassant" as his family name, in order to indicate noble
birth. Gustave discovered a certain Jean-Baptiste Maupassant, conseiller-secrétaire to
the King, who was ennobled in 1752. He then obtained from the Tribunal Civil of Rouen
by decree dated 9 July 1846 the right to style himself "de Maupassant" instead of
"Maupassant" and this was his surname at the birth of his son Guy in 1850.
When Maupassant was 11 and his brother Hervé was five, his mother, an independent-
minded woman, risked social disgrace to obtain a legal separation from her husband,
who was violent towards her.
After the separation, Laure Le Poittevin kept her two sons. With the father's absence,
Maupassant's mother became the most influential figure in the young boy's life. She
was an exceptionally well-read woman and was very fond of classical literature,
particularly Shakespeare. Until the age of thirteen, Guy lived happily with his mother,
at Étretat, in the Villa des Verguies, where, between the sea and the luxuriant
countryside, he grew very fond of fishing and outdoor activities. At age thirteen, his
mother next placed her two sons as day boarders in a private school, the Institution
Leroy-Petit, in Rouen—the Institution Robineau of Maupassant's story La Question du
Latin—for classical studies. From his early education he retained a marked hostility to
religion, and to judge from verses composed around this time he deplored the
ecclesiastical atmosphere, its ritual and discipline. Finding the place to be unbearable,
he finally got himself expelled in his penultimate year.
In 1867, as he entered junior high school, Maupassant made acquaintance with
Gustave Flaubert at Croisset at the insistence of his mother. Next year, in autumn, he
was sent to the Lycée Pierre-Corneille in Rouen where he proved a good scholar
indulging in poetry and taking a prominent part in theatricals. In October 1868, at the
age of 18, he saved the famous poet Algernon Charles Swinburne from drowning off the
coast of Étretat.
The Franco-Prussian War broke out soon after his graduation from college in 1870; he
enlisted as a volunteer. In 1871, he left Normandy and moved to Paris where he spent
ten years as a clerk in the Navy Department. During this time his only recreation and
relaxation was boating on the Seine on Sundays and holidays.
Gustave Flaubert took him under his protection and acted as a kind of literary guardian
to him, guiding his debut in journalism and literature. At Flaubert's home, he met
Émile Zola and the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, as well as many of the proponents
of the realist and naturalist schools. He wrote and played himself in a comedy in 1875
(with the benediction of Flaubert), "À la feuille de rose, maison turque".
In 1878, he was transferred to the Ministry of Public Instruction and became a
contributing editor to several leading newspapers such as Le Figaro, Gil Blas, Le
Gaulois and l'Écho de Paris. He devoted his spare time to writing novels and short
stories.
In 1880 he published what is considered his first masterpiece, "Boule de Suif", which
met with instant and tremendous success. Flaubert characterized it as "a masterpiece
 that will endure." This was Maupassant's first piece of short fiction set during the
Franco-Prussian War, and was followed by short stories such as "Deux Amis", "Mother
Savage", and "Mademoiselle Fifi".
Maupassant at the beginning of his most productive decade.
The decade from 1880 to 1891 was the most fertile period of Maupassant's life. Made
famous by his first short story, he worked methodically and produced two or sometimes
four volumes annually. His talent and practical business sense made him wealthy.
In 1881 he published his first volume of short stories under the title of La Maison
Tellier; it reached its twelfth edition within two years. In 1883 he finished his first novel,
Une Vie (translated into English as A Woman's Life), 25,000 copies of which were sold
in less than a year. His second novel, Bel-Ami, which came out in 1885, had thirty-
seven printings in four months. His editor, Havard, commissioned him to write more
stories, and Maupassant continued to produce them efficiently and frequently. At this
time he wrote what many consider to be his greatest novel, Pierre et Jean.
With a natural aversion to society, he loved retirement, solitude, and meditation. He
traveled extensively in Algeria, Italy, England, Brittany, Sicily, Auvergne, and from each
voyage brought back a new volume. He cruised on his private yacht Bel-Ami, named
after his novel. This life did not prevent him from making friends among the literary
celebrities of his day: Alexandre Dumas, fils had a paternal affection for him; at Aix-les-
Bains he met Hippolyte Taine and became devoted to the philosopher-historian.
Flaubert continued to act as his literary godfather. His friendship with the Goncourts
was of short duration; his frank and practical nature reacted against the ambiance of
gossip, scandal, duplicity, and invidious criticism that the two brothers had created
around them in the guise of an 18th-century style salon.
Maupassant was one of a fair number of 19th-century Parisians (including Charles
Gounod, Alexandre Dumas, fils, and Charles Garnier) who did not care for the Eiffel
Tower.[14] He often ate lunch in the restaurant at its base, not out of preference for the
food but because it was only there that he could avoid seeing its otherwise unavoidable
profile.[15] He and forty-six other Parisian literary and artistic notables attached their
names to an elaborately irate letter of protest against the tower's construction, written
to the Minister of Public Works.
Maupassant also wrote under several pseudonyms, including Joseph Prunier, Guy de
Valmont, and Maufrigneuse (which he used from 1881 to 1885).
In his later years he developed a constant desire for solitude, an obsession for self-
preservation, and a fear of death and paranoia of persecution caused by the syphilis he
had contracted in his youth. It has been suggested that his brother, Hervé, also suffered
from syphilis and the disease may have been congenital.[16] On 2 January 1892,
Maupassant tried to commit suicide by cutting his throat, and was committed to the
private asylum of Esprit Blanche at Passy, in Paris, where he died 6 July 1893 from
syphilis.
Engraving of Maupassant, by Marcellin Desboutin.
Maupassant penned his own epitaph: "I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in
nothing." He is buried in Section 26 of the Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris.

2. Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov was born on the feast day of St. Anthony the Great (17 January
Old Style) 29 January 1860 in Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov in southern Russia.
He was the third of six surviving children. His father, Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov, the
son of a former serf and his wife, was from the village Olkhovatka (Voronezh
Governorate) and ran a grocery store. A director of the parish choir, devout Orthodox
Christian, and physically abusive father, Pavel Chekhov has been seen by some
historians as the model for his son's many portraits of hypocrisy. Chekhov's mother,
Yevgeniya (Morozova), was an excellent storyteller who entertained the children with
tales of her travels with her cloth-merchant father all over Russia. "Our talents we got
from our father," Chekhov remembered, "but our soul from our mother. In adulthood,
Chekhov criticised his brother Alexander's treatment of his wife and children by
reminding him of Pavel's tyranny: "Let me ask you to recall that it was despotism and
lying that ruined your mother's youth. Despotism and lying so mutilated our childhood
that it's sickening and frightening to think about it. Remember the horror and disgust
we felt in those times when Father threw a tantrum at dinner over too much salt in the
soup and called Mother a fool.
In 1876, Chekhov's father was declared bankrupt after overextending his finances
building a new house, having been cheated by a contractor named Mironov.[21] To
avoid debtor's prison he fled to Moscow, where his two eldest sons, Alexander and
Nikolai, were attending university. The family lived in poverty in Moscow. Chekhov's
mother was physically and emotionally broken by the experience. Chekhov was left
behind to sell the family's possessions and finish his education.
Chekhov remained in Taganrog for three more years, boarding with a man by the name
of Selivanov who, like Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, had bailed out the family for
the price of their house. Chekhov had to pay for his own education, which he managed
by private tutoring, catching and selling goldfinches, and selling short sketches to the
newspapers, among other jobs.[24] He sent every ruble he could spare to his family in
Moscow, along with humorous letters to cheer them up. During this time, he read
widely and analytically, including the works of Cervantes, Turgenev, Goncharov, and
Schopenhauer, and wrote a full-length comic drama, Fatherless, which his brother
Alexander dismissed as "an inexcusable through innocent fabrication." Chekhov also
experienced a series of love affairs, one with the wife of a teacher.
In 1879, Chekhov completed his schooling and joined his family in Moscow, having
gained admission to the medical school at I.M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical
University.
By May 1904 Chekhov was terminally ill with tuberculosis. Mikhail Chekhov recalled
that "everyone who saw him secretly thought the end was not far off, but the nearer [he]
was to the end, the less he seemed to realise it". On 3 June he set off with Olga for the
German spa town of Badenweiler in the Black Forest in Germany, from where he wrote
outwardly jovial letters to his sister Masha, describing the food and surroundings, and
assuring her and his mother that he was getting better. In his last letter he complained
about the way German women dressed.
Chekhov's death has become one of "the great set pieces of literary history", retold,
embroidered, and fictionalised many times since, notably in the 1987 short story
"Errand" by Raymond Carver. In 1908 Olga wrote this account of her husband's last
moments:
Anton sat up unusually straight and said loudly and clearly (although he knew almost
no German): Ich sterbe ('I'm dying'). The doctor calmed him, took a syringe, gave him an
injection of camphor, and ordered champagne. Anton took a full glass, examined it,
smiled at me and said: 'It's a long time since I drank champagne.' He drained it and lay
quietly on his left side, and I just had time to run to him and lean across the bed and
call to him, but he had stopped breathing and was sleeping peacefully as a child.
 Chekhov's body was transported[by whom?] to Moscow in a refrigerated railway-car
meant for oysters, a detail that offended Gorky.[96] Some of the thousands of mourners
followed the funeral procession of a General Keller by mistake, to the accompaniment of
a military band.Chekhov was buried next to his father at the Novodevichy Cemetery.

3. Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Akutagawa Ryunosuke was born in the Tsukiji district of Tokyo in March 1892.
The eldest son of Niihara Toshizo, he was adopted by his uncle, Akutagawa Michiaki,
when his mother went mad only a few months after his birth. The boy felt remote from
both his real and his adopted parents, though the insanity of his mother - who lived on
in his father's house, a silent, pallid figure obsessively sketching fox-people - was to
cast a shadow over his entire life.
As a child, Akutagawa was an avid reader of popular ghost stories. As a young student,
his reading grew to cover the Chinese classics, contemporary Japanese authors such as
Ogai and Soseki, as well as Maupassant, Anatole France, Kipling, Poe and other
masters of the short story.
Entering Tokyo Imperial University in 1913 as an English literature major, Akutagawa
lost no time in producing original work. He had his first short story published in 1914,
while Rashomon, his best-known tale and the title story of his first collection, came out
the following year. 1916 marked his breakthrough, when "The Nose" was praised by
Natsume Soseki and literary magazines began to court the young writer.
The early stories are often based on old collections of tales, such as the Konjaku
Monogatari, but with psychological insight and dramatic narrative techniques providing
depth and credibility for a modern audience. One should not, however, suggest that
Akutagawa is a realist. His stories are perfect expressions of the decadent aesthetic,
with the gorgeous and the grotesque, the splendid and the sordid, intertwining in highly
polished prose.
After graduating in 1916, Akutagawa began teaching English at the Naval Engineering
School in Yokosuka, but resigned in 1919, having secured a contract (just as Soseki
had done a decade earlier) to produce fiction for a newspaper. Now married, Akutagawa
was a popular and successful author publishing new collections of his work every year.
In March 1921 Akutagawa was sent to China by the newspaper for which he worked.
His health took a dramatic turn for the worse while in Shanghai. The remainder of his
life was a tormented cocktail of insomnia, gastric problems, and paranoia about having
inherited his mother's mental disorder. When he sought new modes of expression
outside the short story his popularity sagged, while his extensive family responsibilities
were also burdensome.
On July 24, 1927, a physically and mentally exhausted Akutagawa killed himself with
an overdose of barbiturates. The signs of despair are plain to see in Kappa, a
superficially playful fable written just a few months prior to his death. The human
narrator is a patient in a mental hospital: an embryo begs to be aborted out of fear that
he will succumb to hereditary insanity: and Tok - a depressive poet who finally commits
suicide - is regarded by many commentators as a self-portrait.
Akutagawa's life was short, but his oeuvre of over 100 short stories was nonetheless
enough to establish him as the uncontested master of the short story in modern
Japanese literature.

4. Rabindranath Tagore
 Rabindranath Tagore was a poet, musician, polymath, Ayurveda-researcher and
artist who recast music, Bengali literature and Indian art in the late 19th and early
20th centuries. In 1913, Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win Nobel
Prize in Literature. Rabindranath Tagore was also referred to as 'the Bard of Bengal'.
Rabindranath Tagore was born as Robindronath Thakur on May 7, 1861, to
Debendranath Tagore and Sarada Devi in Calcutta, Bengal Presidency, British
India(present-day Kolkata, West Bengal, India). Tagore's mother Sarada Devi died when
he was a child and his father Debendranath Tagore travelled a lot. Therefore, Tagore
was raised by servants. Dwijendranath, Rabindranath Tagore's oldest brother, was a
philosopher and poet. Tagore's other brother Satyendranath was the first Indian to be
appointed in the Indian Civil Service. His brother, Jyotirindranath, was a musician,
composer, and playwright while his sister Swarnakumari was a novelist.
Rabindranath's brother Hemendranath taught him anatomy, geography and history,
literature, mathematics, Sanskrit, and English. At the age of 11 after his Janeu, Tagore
toured India with his father. Rabindranath Tagore visited his father's Santiniketan
estate and stayed in Amritsar for a month before reaching the Himalayan hill station of
Dalhousie where Tagore read biographies, studied history, astronomy, modern science,
Sanskrit, and examined the classical poetry of 'Kalidasa'. Tagore was highly influenced
by the Gurbani and Nanak Bani which were sung at Golden Temple, Amritsar. In 1882,
Tagore made his debut with a short story in Bengali 'Bhikarini'.
In 1878, Rabindra Nath Tagore enrolled himself at a public school in England because
his father wanted him to be a barrister. Tagore read law at University College, London,
but opted out again to study independently. He read Shakespeare's plays Coriolanus,
and Antony and Cleopatra and the Religio Medici of Thomas Browne which highly
impressed him.
In 1880, Tagore returned to Bengal without any degree and started publishing poems,
stories and novels. Although he didn't receive any recognition at the national level but
became famous in Bengal. Rabindranath Tagore composed nearly 2,230 songs which
are known as 'Rabindrasangit'. Tagore was highly influenced by the thumri style of
Hindustani music. In 1971, Rabindranath Tagore wrote a poem ' Amar Sonar
Bangla'(National Anthem of Bangladesh), to protest the Partition of Bengal in 1905 on
communal lines. The Bengal partition cut off the Muslim majority East Bengal from the
Hindu majority West Bengal. Tagore wrote 'Jana Gana Mana' (National Anthem of India)
which was first composed as 'Bharat Bhagyo Bidhata'. In 1911, 'Jana Gana Mana' was
first at Calcutta (present-day Kolkata) session of INC and was adopted as the National
Anthem of India in 1950. 'Sri Lanka Matha' is the National Anthem of Sri Lanka and
was inspired by Tagore's work. Sitar maestro Vilayat Khan and sarodiyas Buddhadev
Dasgupta and Amjad Ali Khan are all inspired by Rabindranath Tagore's work. At the
age of 20, Tagore wrote his first original dramatic piece 'Valmiki Pratibha'. In 1890,
Tagore wrote 'Visarjan'-- his finest drama. In 1912, Tagore wrote 'Dak Ghar' where the
child Amal defying his stuffy and puerile confines by ultimately fall asleep. Tagore
defined death as 'spiritual freedom from the world of hoarded wealth and certified
creeds'. Tagore's other play was 'Chandalika' the story of an untouchable girl and
described how Ananda (disciple of Gautama Buddha), asks a tribal girl for water.
Rabindranath Tagore at the age of sixty years started drawing and painting. After the
encouragement by artists of France, Tagore's work made a debut appearance in Paris. It
is said that Tagore was red-green colour blind and his artworks reflect strange colour
schemes. In 1900, Tagore wrote to Jagadishchandra Bose about his drawings. Tagore
withdrew from painting as he was using eraser more than the pencil and was
 dissatisfied with his artwork. Currently, Tagore's 102 works are listed by India's
National Gallery of Modern Art lists in its collections.
In late 1937, Rabindranath Tagore began losing consciousness and remained in a coma
for a long period. In 1940, Tagore again went into a coma and never recovered. After
years of chronic pain and long term illness, Tagore died on August 7, 1941, at the age of
80 years. Rabindranath Tagore took his last breath in the mansion he was brought up.

5. Naguib Mahfouz
Naguib Mahfouz was born on December 11, 1911, in the old Gamaliya quarter of
Cairo, the youngest of seven children in a family of five boys and two girls. Although he
had many siblings, Mahfouz felt like an only child because the next youngest brother
was ten years older than him. He mourned his lack of normal sibling bonds, which is
reflected in the portrayal of fraternal relationships in much of his work. But his
childhood was a happy one—the family was stable and loving, with religion playing a
very important role in their life—and there are many signs of Mahfouz’s affection for his
early childhood in his work.
He spent his first nine or ten years in Gamaliya, which plays an important role in his
earlier, realistic novels such as Midaq Alley and The Cairo Trilogy, and figures
symbolically in later books like Children of the Alley and The Harafish. The alley of his
childhood is a kind of microcosm of Egyptian society in his works. The family house,
also, seems to have inspired Mahfouz and serves as the model for the Abd al-Jawad
family house in The Cairo Trilogy. Mahfouz recalls the various rooms and secret places
in these novels, including the roof, which becomes a scene for family gatherings and the
meetings of lovers.
The 1919 Revolution also had a lasting effect on Mahfouz, leaving him with his first real
sense of nationalist feeling and greatly influencing his writings. Interestingly, he later
became disillusioned with the Revolution of 1952, though he took issue with its
practices, not its principles. He voiced his criticisms clearly in some of his writings of
the 1960s (in novels like Miramar), but unlike many other intellectuals of the time was
never arrested by Nasser.
Around 1920, his family moved to Abbasiya, a new suburban district, which like
Gamaliya is frequently evoked in his novels and short stories. This is where, like Kamal
in The Cairo Trilogy, Mahfouz experienced love for the first time.
Mahfouz began writing in primary school, when he was a fan of detective, historical,
and adventure novels. In secondary school he moved on to the innovators of Arabic
fiction—Taha Hussein, Muhammed Husayn Haykal, Ibrahim al-Mazini—who served him
as models for the short story.
Despite his penchant for writing and his early facility with mathematics and the
sciences, Mahfouz elected to study philosophy at Fuad I University (now Cairo
University) in 1930, graduating in 1934. His interest in philosophy was partly inspired
by the writings of Abbas al-Aqqad. Beginning in secondary school and continuing
through his university years, he published more than forty articles in various
magazines and newspapers, most of which dealt with philosophical and psychological
issues and were heavily influenced by Henri Bergson.
From 1934 until his retirement in 1971 at the age of sixty, he worked in a variety of
government departments as a civil servant. He held a secretarial post at Cairo
University until 1938, when he moved to the Ministry of Religious Endowments to work
as a parliamentary secretary to the minister.
In 1945 he requested transfer to the Ghuri Library, near his birthplace Gamaliya, where
he managed the Good Loan Project, an interest-free loan program for the poor. This was
a very happy time for him; he had plenty of opportunity to observe the life of the area
and to read western literature, including his favorites: Shakespeare, Conrad, Melville,
Flaubert, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust, O’Neill, Shaw, Ibsen, and Strindberg. From the
1950s he worked as secretary to the Minister of National Guidance, director of the Film
Censorship Office, director-general of the Film Support Organization, advisor to the
General Organization for Film Industry, and finally as advisor to the Minister of
Culture.
Mahfouz remained a bachelor until 1954, when he married at the age of 43. He and his
wife raised two daughters in their apartment in Agouza, a Nileside district of Cairo. He
left Egypt only three times in his life, once to Yemen, once to the former Yugoslavia, and
once to England for surgery.
His first novel, Khufu’s Wisdom, was published in 1939, and following that he wrote 35
more novels and fifteen collections of short stories, as well as Echoes of an
Autobiography in 1994.
An attempt on his life in 1994—he was stabbed in the neck outside his home by a
religious fanatic—left him able to write only with great difficulty for half an hour a day—
and thus he wrote the very short fictions based on his dreams that he called “Dreams of
Convalescence,” two selections of which were published in English translation as The
Dreams and Dreams of Departure by the AUC Press, in 2004 and 2006 respectively.
From the late 1940s to the early 1980s he also worked on some twenty-five film
screenplays, an activity that seems to have influenced the use of such devices as
montage and flashback in his prose writings. Over thirty Egyptian films have been
based on Mahfouz’s novels and short stories, but he was never interested in adapting
his own books for the screen; the screenplay adaptations were done by others.
He was invited to be a writer emeritus at al-Ahram newspaper in 1971, and he
continued to produce a weekly column that was published simultaneously in Arabic in
al-Ahram and in English in Al-Ahram Weekly until shortly before his death. A collection
of these columns was published for his ninetieth birthday celebration in 2001 as
Naguib Mahfouz at Sidi Gaber: Reflections of a Nobel Laureate, 1994–2001: From
conversations with Mohamed Salmawy.
Mahfouz has received the Egyptian State Prize twice for his writings. In 1988 he was
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Swedish Academy of Letters, in its citation
for the prize, noted that Mahfouz “through works rich in nuance—now clear-sightedly
realistic, now evocatively ambiguous—has formed an Arabic narrative art that applies to
all mankind.”
In 1989 Mahfouz received the Presidential Medal from the American University in Cairo,
which also awarded him an honorary doctorate in June 1995. In 1992 he was elected
an honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in
2002 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Naguib Mahfouz died in Cairo on 30 August 2006 at the age of 94, in the presence of
his wife Atiya and his daughters Faten and Umm Kalthum.