Guy de Maupassant

Flaubert, an old family friend, mentored Maupassant for years before allowing him to publish anything, drilling him in precision and forbidding cliché. War intervened first: Maupassant served in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, an experience that supplied material for some of his bleakest early stories, and afterward he worked for a decade as a government clerk while writing at night.

Once launched, he wrote at a staggering pace (several hundred short stories alongside novels like Bel-Ami (1885)) while rowing, sailing, and pursuing an extravagant social and sexual life that eventually caught up with him: syphilis contracted young led, in his early forties, to breakdown, a suicide attempt, and confinement in a Paris asylum.

He died there in 1893, not yet forty-three.