André Maurois

André Maurois (; born Émile Salomon Wilhelm Herzog; 26 July 1885 – 9 October 1967) was a French author.

Biography Maurois was born on 26 July 1885 in Elbeuf and educated at the Lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen, both in Normandy. A member of the Javal family, Maurois was the son of Ernest Herzog, a Jewish textile manufacturer, and his wife Alice Lévy-Rueff. His family had fled Alsace after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and took refuge in Elbeuf, where they owned a woollen mill. This family background is reflected in Maurois' Bernard Quesnay: the story of a young World War I veteran with artistic and intellectual inclinations who is drawn, much against his will, to work as a director in his grandfather's textile mills – a character clearly having many autobiographical elements.

During World War I, Maurois joined the French army, serving as an interpreter for Lieutenant Colonel Winston Churchill, and later as a liaison officer with the British army. His first novel, Les silences du colonel Bramble, published in 1918, was a witty and socially realistic account of that experience, and was an immediate success in France. The book was soon translated, and became popular in the United Kingdom and other English-speaking countries as The Silence of Colonel Bramble. Many of his other works have also been translated into English, for they often dealt with British people or topics (such as his biographies of Disraeli, Byron, and Shelley).

In 1938 Maurois was elected to the prestigious Académie française. He was encouraged and assisted in seeking this membership by Marshal Philippe Pétain, and he made a point of acknowledging with thanks his debt to Pétain in his 1941 autobiography, Call no man happy – though by the time of writing their paths had sharply diverged, Pétain having become Head of State of Vichy France.

When World War II began, he was appointed the French Official Observer attached to the British General Headquarters. In this capacity he accompanied the British Army to Belgium. He knew personally the main politicians in the French government, and on 10 June 1940 he was sent on a mission to London. After the Armistice ended that mission, Maurois was demobilised and travelled from England to Canada. He wrote of these experiences in his book Tragedy in France.

Later in World War II he served in the French army and the Free French Forces.

His Maurois pseudonym became his legal name in 1947.

He died in 1967 in Neuilly-sur-Seine after a long career as an author of novels, biographies, histories, children's books and science fiction stories. He is buried in Neuilly-sur-Seine Old Communal Cemetery near Paris.

Family

In 1912, Maurois married Jeanne-Marie Wanda de Szymkiewicz, a young Polish-Russian aristocrat who had studied at Oxford University. Together they had three children.

Jean-Richard Bloch was his brother-in-law.