Octave Mirbeau

Octave Mirbeau was a French author, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, journalist, and playwright who lived from February 16, 1848, to February 16, 1917. He was famous in Europe and had a lot of success with the public. His highly controversial novels about violence, abuse, and psychological detachment were also popular with the literary and artistic avant-garde. Thirty languages have made copies of his work. Mirbeau grew up in the town of Rémalard in Normandy. His grandparents were...See more

Octave Mirbeau was a French author, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, journalist, and playwright who lived from February 16, 1848, to February 16, 1917. He was famous in Europe and had a lot of success with the public. His highly controversial novels about violence, abuse, and psychological detachment were also popular with the literary and artistic avant-garde. Thirty languages have made copies of his work. Mirbeau grew up in the town of Rémalard in Normandy. His grandparents were notaries, and his father was a doctor. He went to a Jesuit college in Vannes for high school, but was kicked out when he was fifteen. Two years after the terrible war of 1870, he was tempted by a call from Dugué de la Fauconnerie, the head of the Bonapartists. He hired him as a private secretary and put him in touch with L'Ordre de Paris. When Mirbeau started writing, it was under his own name. Before that, he worked as a ghostwriter for the Bonapartists and as a journalist for them. For the next few years, he wrote to share his moral and artistic beliefs. See less