MAUROIS, ANDR

born July 26, 1885, Elbeuf, France died Oct. 9, 1967, Paris pseudonym of mile Herzog biographer, novelist, essayist, and prominent personality in French letters for 50 years. Born into a prosperous family of textile manufacturers, Maurois came under the influence of the French philosopher and teacher Alain (mile-Auguste Chartier). He was a liaison officer in the British army during World War I, and his first literary success was a humorous commentary on warfare and the British character in Les Silences du Colonel Bramble (1918; The Silence of Colonel Bramble). His novels, including Bernard Quesnay (1926) and Climats (1928; Whatever Gods May Be), focus on middle-class provincial life, marriage, and the family. As a historian he demonstrated a broad culture in his popular histories: Histoire de l'Angleterre (1937; History of England), and Histoire des tats-Unis (1943; History of the United States). Maurois is best known, in both France and the English-speaking world, for biographies that maintain the narrative interest of novels. Among his many biographies, praised for their clear and graceful prose and their penetrating analyses of character, are works on Percy Bysshe Shelley (Ariel, 1923), Lord Byron (Byron, 1930), Victor Hugo (Olympio, 1954), George Sand (Llia, 1952), and Honor de Balzac (Promthe, 1965; Prometheus, the Life of Balzac). la Recherche de Marcel Proust (1949; The Quest for Proust) is considered his finest biography.