Andre Maurois was a French novelist and biographer. Although Maurois wrote various novels and short stories dealing with French middle-class life, he chiefly excelled as an interpreter of the Anglo-American world and as a biographer. His studies of great cultural figures, notable for their scholarship, lively description, and psychological insight, created a vogue for the biographie romancée.
Background
A native of Elbcuf. he was born into a patriotic Jewish cloth manufacturing family that had left Alsace for Normandy after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. Maurois later recounted that story in his semiautobiographical novel, Bernard Quesnay (1926).
Education
Educated at Lycee of Elbeuf and Lycee Corneille of Rouen. Graduated from the University of Caen. Doctor of Literature, University of Oxford.
Doctor of Civil Law, Edinburgh U., St. Andrews U., Doctor of Literature, Princeton University, 1933, U. Maryland., 1963.
Career
While studying in Rouen and Caen, he was not spared the anti-Semitism engendered by the Dreyfus affair; and the ten years he spent working in the family business also provided material for some of his books. A turning point in his career followed the outbreak of World War 1, during which Maurois served as a liaison officer with the British expeditionary force. He drew on this wartime experience for The Silence of Colonel Bramble (1918), a hilarious book of reportage, set in an officers’ mess where French and English attitudes are subtly contrasted, that made the author famous overnight. It had asequel in Les discours du docteur O’Grady (1922).
Between the two world wars, Maurois also displayed a remarkable knowledge of British culture and mentality in the stories entitled L’Anglaise and the popular King Edward and His Times (1933), Prophets and Poets. (1935). a volume of critical essays, and his History of England (1937). As with the author’s later books, nearly all of these were translated into English, editions in both languages often appearing in the same year.
A member of the Académie Française from 1938, Maurois (unlike his communist brother-in-law and fellow writer, Jean-Richard Bloch) was naively prepared to accept the Vichy regime cstablislted by Marshal Petáin after the French collapse in 1940. Threatened with arrest and deportation as a Jew, however, the writer took refuge in the United States, where he taught at Princeton and contiuned publishing books until 1946. His output included a history of the United States (1943— 1944) and biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Dwight D. Eisenhower and George Washington.
André Maurois returned to his native land after the war and published a history of France (1947), another Docteur O’Grady frolic (1950), and a new series of biographical works. Apart from Cecil Rhodes (1953) and the Brownings (1955), he concentrated on French personalities, such as Alexandre Dumas, père et fils (1957), Napoleon, (1964) and Balzac (1965).
Three outstanding examples, drawing upon the author’s own research as well as unpublished documents, w'ere The Quest for Proust (1949). Leba, or the Life of George Sand (1952). and Olympio, or the Life of Victor Hugo (1954). A sixteen-volume edition of his collected works appeared in 1950-1955 and two volumes of memoirs: I Remember, I Remember! (1942) and Call No Man Happy (1970). Though acknowledging himself to be a Jew, Maurois took only a marginal interest in Jewish affairs and made the converted Disraeli his one Jewish biographical subject.
Membership
Served as interpreter, later liaison officer, with British Expeditionary Force, World War I, 1914-1918.