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Numbering more than four hundred in all, including the beloved Inspector Maigret stories, Georges Simenon's novels have been translated into some fifty languages, with sales exceeding 500 million copies worldwide. Now, drawing on unprecedented access to Simenon's papers, family, and friends, Pierre Assouline gives us the utterly absorbing story of this tormented and egomaniacal genius of literary mass production.
The narrative begins with a troubled youth in France during the 1920s: Simenon's early involvement with crime and prostitutes inspired the guilt that would haunt his adulthood and the subjects he would obsessively probe in his fiction. Assouline vividly re-creates Simenon's complex and painful family relationships, as well as his controversial political activities, occasionally as a partisan of the extreme Right.
As we witness Simenon's evolution into a self-fashioned literary prodigy (at the height of powers he could produce eighty pages a day), we also watch the growth - and satisfaction - of his notoriously outsize appetites for fame, wealth, and women. And we see him in the company of some of the great cultural icons of his time, including his lover Josephine Baker as well as Henry Miller, Colette, Jean Renoir, and Andre Gide, who called Simenon the greatest novelist of the century.
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Previews available in: English French
Subjects
Belgian Novelists, Biography, Novelists, Belgian, Biographies, Écrivains français, Biografie, New York Times reviewedPeople
Georges Simenon (1903-)Times
20th centuryShowing 5 featured editions. View all 5 editions?
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Simenon: A Biography
November 17, 1998, Random House Value Publishing
Hardcover
in English
051727759X 9780517277591
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Simenon: A Biography
June 10, 1997, Knopf
Hardcover
in English
- 1st American Ed edition
0679402853 9780679402855
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- Created April 29, 2008
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August 6, 2010 | Edited by IdentifierBot | added LibraryThing ID |
April 24, 2010 | Edited by Open Library Bot | Fixed duplicate goodreads IDs. |
April 16, 2010 | Edited by bgimpertBot | Added goodreads ID. |
December 14, 2009 | Edited by WorkBot | link works |
April 29, 2008 | Created by an anonymous user | Imported from amazon.com record |