Edmond About

Born in Dieuze, Lorraine, on February 14, 1828, Edmond About studied at the École Normale Supérieure and went on to build a varied literary career as a novelist, journalist, publicist, and art critic. Early in his career he spent time in Greece, and that experience fed into some of his best-known writing, including La Grèce contemporaine and the satirical novel Le Roi des montagnes.

About wrote with a brisk, clear style that appealed to a broad audience. Alongside novels, he produced travel writing, political commentary, plays, and journalism, often bringing a skeptical, humorous eye to public life. His work was especially noted for its wit and its interest in contemporary issues rather than distant historical subjects.

He was elected to the Académie française in 1884, near the end of his life, and died in Paris on January 16, 1885. Today he is remembered as a vivid 19th-century French voice whose fiction and essays captured the debates, curiosities, and contradictions of his time.