Henry de Montherlant
| Henry de Montherlant | |
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| Born | Henry Millon de Montherlant 26 April 1895 Paris, France |
| Died | 21 September 1972 (aged 77) Paris, France |
| Nationality | French |
| Period | Early-mid 20th century |
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Henry Marie Joseph Frédéric Expedite Millon de Montherlant (French: [mɔ̃tɛʁlɑ̃]; 20 April 1895 – 21 September 1972) was a French essayist, novelist, and dramatist. He was elected to the Académie française in 1960.
Born in Paris, a descendant of an aristocratic (yet obscure) Picard family, he was educated at the Lycée Janson de Sailly and the Sainte-Croix boarding school at Neuilly-sur-Seine. Henry's father was a hard-line reactionary (to the extent of despising the post-Dreyfus Affair army as too subservient to the Republic, and refusing to have electricity or the telephone installed in his house).
In 1912, he was expelled from the Catholic Sainte-Croix de Neuilly academy for a relationship with a fellow male student, a relationship that he would depict in his 1969 novel Les Garçons. After the deaths of his father and mother in 1914 and 1915, he went to live with his doting grandmother and eccentric uncles.
Mobilised in 1916, he was wounded and decorated. Marked by his experience of war, he wrote Songe ('Dream'), an autobiographic novel, as well as his Chant funèbre pour les morts de Verdun (Funeral Chant for the Dead at Verdun), both exaltations of heroism during the Great War.
In the 1920s and 30s de Montherlant achieved critical success with the 1934 novel Les Célibataires, and sold millions of copies of his tetralogy Les Jeunes Filles, written from 1936 through 1939. In these years de Montherlant traveled extensively, mainly to Spain, Italy, and Algeria. During the war he remained in Paris and continued to write plays, poems, essays, and worked as a war correspondent.
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