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The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant Essay Example

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The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant Essay Example
THE WRITER: GUY de MAUPASSANT

· He was born on August 5, 1850, Château de Miromesnil, near Dieppe, France. He died of Syphilis on July 6, 1893 in Paris. It is possible that his disease was congenital.

· He was a French naturalist writer of short stories and novels. He is by generally considered the greatest Frenchshort-story writer.

· Guy received his first education from the church. At age 13, he was sent to a small seminary at Yvetot that took both lay and clerical pupils. He felt a decided dislike for this way of life and intentionally engineered his own expulsion for some trivial offense in 1868.

· His mother asked Gustave Flaubert to keep an eye on him at a point in time. This was the beginning of the apprenticeship that was the making of Maupassant the writer.

· Whenever Flaubert was staying in Paris, he used to invite Maupassant to lunch on Sundays, lecture him on prose style, and correct his youthful literary exercises. He also introduced him to some of the leading writers of the time like Émile Zola, Ivan Turgenev, Edmond Goncourt, and Henry James.

·

· "Maupassant's work is thoroughly realistic. His characters inhabit a world of material desires and sensual appetites in which lust, greed, and ambition are the driving forces, and any higher feelings are either absent or doomed to cruel disappointment."

· The tragic power of many of the stories derives from the fact that Maupassant presents his characters, poor people or rich bourgeois, as the victims of ironic necessity, crushed by a fate that they have dared to defy yet still struggling against it hopelessly.

ABOUT THE NECKLACE

· It was first published in the Paris newspaper Le Gaulois on February 17, 1884, and was subsequently included in his 1885 collection of short stories Tales of Day and Night (Contes dejour et de la nuit).

· It was an instant

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