André Maurois

André Maurois was the literary pen name of Émile Salomon Wilhelm Herzog, a French novelist, biographer and essayist born in Elbeuf, Normandy, in 1885 and who died in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1967. His work belongs to the French prose tradition of the first half of the twentieth century, and his importance lies in bridging French and Anglo-Saxon culture and in popularising the novelised biography as a genre.

He came from a Jewish family of textile manufacturers who, after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, moved from Alsace to Elbeuf and brought their workforce with them. He studied at the Lycée Corneille in Rouen and later in Caen, where the philosopher Alain was one of his teachers, an influence that stayed with him. During the First World War he worked as an interpreter and liaison officer with the British army. That experience gave rise to his first novel, The Silence of Colonel Bramble (1918), a witty and realistic account that was an immediate success in France and became popular in English-speaking countries.

Among his novels, Bernard Quesnay (1926), about a young veteran pulled against his will into his grandfather's textile business, draws heavily on his own background. His best-known works, however, are his biographies: Ariel: The Life of Shelley, Disraeli, Byron and Balzac, among others. In the essay form, The Art of Living draws on the practical wisdom he absorbed from Alain.

His ideas rest on the view that literature is an art of understanding people through their passions, contradictions and circumstances rather than a mere record of facts. He favoured clear, sensitive prose, in which the biographer approaches a subject much as a novelist approaches a character without giving up documentation. In his writings on happiness and the art of living he proposes a modest ethic: attention to personal balance, lucidity and human ties.

During the Second World War he opposed the Vichy government, took refuge in the United States and later fought with the Free French. After the war he returned to France, received the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour and legally adopted his pen name in 1947. His influence endures mainly in literary biography and in introducing Anglo-Saxon culture to the French-speaking world.