Guy de Maupassant was born in Dieppe in 1850. Through Gustave Flaubert he met other luminaries of his age, such as Zola, Daudet and Turgenev. His influence on French literature was profound and his writing is of pivotal importance in the historical development of the short story, influencing such writers as Ambrose Bierce, O. Henry and Henry James. The majority of his three hundred short stories and six novels were written between 1880 and 1890, a period in which he also contributed to several Parisian daily newspapers. He died in 1893, at the age of forty-three. Isak Dinesen was the nom de plume of Karen Blixen, who was born in Rungsted, Denmark in 1885. She studied art in Copenhagen, Paris and Rome before marrying her cousin Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke in 1914 and moving to Kenya to live on a farm. In 1934 Dinesen made her literary debut with the publication of Seven Gothic Tales. This was followed in 1937 by Out of Africa, an autobiographical account of her life in Kenya, which was later made into a film. She died in 1962 in Denmark.
