Ernest Daudet

Louis-Marie Ernest Daudet was born in Nîmes on May 31, 1837, and died on August 21, 1921, at Les Petites-Dalles in France. He is generally described as a French journalist, novelist, and historian, and his career stretched across several literary forms.

Early on, he worked for newspapers in Paris and the provinces, and he also served as a secretary-editor in the French Senate. That mix of journalism and public life seems to have shaped the rest of his writing, which included fiction, memoirs, and historical studies.

He is often mentioned in connection with the famous Daudet literary family because he was the older brother of Alphonse Daudet. But Ernest Daudet was a notably productive writer in his own right, with a large body of work recorded by the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and his name remained visible enough in French literary culture that the Académie française later attached it to a literary prize.