"Celebrated as a popular nineteenth-century author and master of the modern short story, Maupassant (1850-93) has endured more than a century of prudish critics, condescending biographers, unscrupulous editors, and inaccurate translators. Lloyd's goal in this succinct volume, one of the best in Reaktion's Critical Lives series, is to set the record straight. In some two hundred pages, Lloyd highlights Maupassant's cynicism, debauchery, and lust for life, and explains the sociopolitical context that allowed him to thrive as a journalist and author before succumbing to madness and early death. Favoring material evidence over speculation and close analysis over generalization, Lloyd delves into selected letters, newspaper articles, and novels and short stories to highlight the impressive range of a writer too often reduced to a handful of safe classics. Lloyd skillfully bridges the gap between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, offering fresh interpretations of incidents in Maupassant's life and lamenting that his work has been 'relentlessly pillaged' by the film and television industries. This is an engrossing biography, all the more important since it is, shockingly, the only biography of Maupassant currently available in English. Essential.".