ALPHONSE DAUDET
French author (1840-1897)
Biography:
Alphonse Daudet was born in Nimes in 1840. From the very beginning, his carreer as a writer was quite successful and prolific. He wrote his first novel at the age of 14. Women in Love (Les Amoureuses, 1857), his first published book, is a compilation of poems dedicated to Marie Rieu, his lover at that time. Letters from My Mill (Lettres de mon moulin, 1866), considered to be a French masterpieces, is composed by a group of delightful, Provence-inspired short stories. Le Petit Chose (1868) is a semiautobiographical novel touchingly descriptive of his life at boarding school and sometimes compared to Dickens’s David Copperfield.
His funniest and most read book appeared in 1871, under the title of Tartarin de Tarascon, a kind of parody of a Don Quixote of the French Midi. Two more books about this curious and loving character followed.
Daudet enjoyed for a few years prosperity and fame after the appearance of Fromont the Younger and Risler the Elder (1874), which won an award from the Académie Française. He died in Paris in 1897.
Alphonse Daudet, author of illustrated works:
La Chèvre de Monsieur Seguin, May Angeli, Hachette, 1975.
La chèvre de M. Seguin, illustrated by May Angeli, Hachette, 1977.
Tartarin de Tarascon, illustrated by Roger Blachon, Gallimard, 1977.
Le Petit chose, illustrated by Avoine, Hachette, 1994.
Tartarin de Tarascon, illustrated by Marie-José Banroques, Deux Coqs d'or, 1995.
La chèvre de Monsieur Seguin, illustrated by Eric Battut, Didier jeunesse, 1999.