This time I'd like to tell you about the author. Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was a popular 19th-century French writer, considered one of the fathers of the modern short story and one of the form's finest exponents. He also wrote under several pseudonyms such as Joseph Prunier, Guy de Valmont, and Maufrigneuse .

Maupassant is considered one of the fathers of the modern short story. He delighted in clever plotting, and served as a model for Somerset Maugham and O. Henry in this respect. His stories about expensive jewelry ("The Necklace", "La parure") are imitated with a twist by Maugham ("Mr Know-All", "A String of Beads") and Henry James ("Paste").

Taking his cue from Balzac, Maupassant wrote comfortably in both the high-Realist and fantastic modes; stories and novels such as "L'Héritage" and Bel-Ami aim to recreate Third Republic France in a realistic way, whereas many of the short stories (notably "Le Horla" and "Qui sait?") describe apparently supernatural phenomena.

The supernatural in Maupassant, however, is often implicitly a symptom of the protagonists' troubled minds; Maupassant was fascinated by the burgeoning discipline of psychiatry, and attended the public lectures of Jean-Martin Charcot between 1885 and 1886.[6] This interest is reflected in his fiction.

Maupassant is notable as the subject of one of Leo Tolstoy's essays on art: The Works of Guy de Maupassant.