André Maurois
André Maurois, born Émile Salomon Wilhelm Herzog in 1885, was a prominent French writer known for his novels and biographies. He initially worked in his family's textile business before transitioning to writing, influenced by his experiences during World War I. His debut novel, "Les Silences du Colonel Bramble," achieved considerable success, especially after its English translation. Maurois became well-regarded for his biographical works, including "Ariel: Ou, La Vie de Shelley," although he later committed to rigorous research following critical feedback on this publication. His literary contributions extended to biographies of notable figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Marcel Proust, the latter explored in his acclaimed work "A La Recherche de Marcel Proust." Throughout his life, Maurois was actively engaged in academia, lecturing at prestigious institutions like Trinity College and Princeton. After World War II, he returned to France, where he continued to write until his death in 1967. Maurois’s life reflects a blend of personal loss, literary ambition, and a deep engagement with both French and American culture.
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Subject Terms
André Maurois
Author
- Born: July 26, 1885
- Birthplace: Elbeuf, France
- Died: October 9, 1967
- Place of death: Neuilly-sur-Seine, France
Biography
André Maurois was born into the Herzog family as Émile Salomon Wilhelm Herzog. After using André Maurois as his pen name for many years, he adopted Maurois as his legal name in 1947. He was stationed in a village named Maurois in World War I, and André was the name of a cousin killed in the war.
Maurois’s father was a textile manufacturer, and the family owned a wool mill in Elbeuf, Normandy, where the family had settled upon leaving Alsace after the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Exhibiting intelligence at a young age, Mauoris attended school in Elbeuf and Rouen and went on to earn degrees in letters and science and in philosophy from the University of Caen. Beginning at age eighteen, he worked in the family’s factory for eight years, and with the onset of World War I, he became first an interpreter and then a liaison to the British Army.
His war experiences led to Maurois’s first novel, Les Silences du Colonel Bramble, published to great success in 1918; it found popularity also with English-speaking populations when it was translated as The Silence of Colonel Bramble in 1920. His loose biography of Percy Shelley, entitled Ariel: Ou, La Vie de Shelley (1923), was also well received, and prompted Maurois to continue in the biographical genre. However, after critics condemned the inaccuracies of Ariel: Ou, La Vie de Shelley, Maurois became consciously committed to performing extensive research and to adhering to academic standards in his future publications, which included numerous biographies of French authors; various historical books; and biographical texts for children and young adults, including books on Benjamin Franklin and Dwight Eisenhower, written during Maurois’s time in the United States.
Maurois’s wife, Jeanne-Marie Wande de Szymkievicz, died in 1924 and his father died in 1925; it was then that Maurois decided to leave the family’s textile business and focus on his writing. His second wife was Simone de Caillavet, a niece of Marcel Proust, who would be the subject of A La Recerche de Marcel Proust (1949; The Quest for Proust, 1950), widely held to be Maurois’s best biographical work.
Maurois lectured at Cambridge’s Trinity College in 1926 and was invited to Princeton in 1929; he joined the French Academy, or the Académie Française, in 1938. He served in the French army during World War II and moved to the United States after Germany occupied France. During this time, he lectured at the University of Kansas City and Mills College. He left for North Africa in 1943 to serve with Allied Forces, and he returned in 1946 to France, where he continued to write and publish for the next twenty years.