Henri Murger
Louis-Henri Murger, also known as Henri Murger and Henry Murger (27 March 1822 – 28 January 1861), was a French novelist and poet.
He is chiefly distinguished as the author of the 1847-1849 book
Biography
Murger was born and died in Paris. He was the son of a Savoyard immigrant who worked as a tailor and janitor for an apartment building in the Rue Saint Georges. He had a scanty and fragmented education. After leaving school at 15 he worked in a variety of menial jobs before securing one in a lawyer's office. While there he also wrote poetry which came to the attention of the French writer Étienne de Jouy. De Jouy's connections enabled him to secure the position of secretary to Count Tolstoi, a Russian nobleman living in Paris. Murger's literary career began about 1841. His first essays were mainly literary and poetic, but under the pressure of earning a living he wrote whatever he could find a market for, turning out prose as he put it, "at the rate of eighty francs an acre".[2] At one point he edited a fashion newspaper, Le Moniteur de la Mode, and a paper for the millinery trade, Le Castor. His position gradually improved when the French writer Champfleury, with whom he lived for a time, urged Murger to devote himself to fiction. His first big success was Scènes de la vie de bohème. In 1851 Murger published a sequel, Scènes de la vie de jeunesse. Several more works followed, but none of them brought him the same popular acclaim.
He lived much of the next ten years in a country house outside Paris, dogged by financial problems and recurrent ill health. In 1859 he received the
Spelling of the name
Early in his career, in an effort to make himself appear more "elegant and noticeable", Murger signed his name as "Henry Mürger", the English-looking "y" and German-looking umlaut both being exotic in French.[4] - though the spelling of Henry rather than Henri was also archaic French, having been standard orthography (along with such spellings as loy and roy) prior to c. 1775 and not totally supplanted by "i" until after 1790. After experimenting with other variations he eventually kept the former but dropped the latter, so that all of his best-known works were published under the name "Henry Murger".
Works
- Scènes de la vie de bohème (1847–49).
- Scènes de la vie de jeunesse (1851).
- Le Pays latin (1851).
- Propos de ville et propos de théâtre (1853).
- Scènes de campagne (1854).
- Le Roman de toutes les femmes (1854).
- Ballades et Fantaisies (1854).
- Les Buveurs d'eau (1854).
- Le Dessous du panier (1855).
- Le Dernier rendez-vous (1856).
- Les Nuits d’hiver (1856).
- Les Vacances de Camille (1857).
- Le Sabot rouge (1860).
- Madame Olympe (1860).
In English translation
- The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter (1888).
- Scenes of Bohemian Life. Trans. Robert Holton. Anthem Press (2023).
- Winter Nights (1923).
References
- ^ Original French: Dans ce volume il y a un chef d'œuvre, une larme devenue une perle de poésie, nous voulons dire: "la Chanson de Musette", Théophile Gautier, 'Rapport sur les progrès de la poésie (1868), Diogene Editions Libres, 2006, p. 47.
- ^ Introductory essay to Henry Murger, The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter, New York: Société des Beaux-Arts, 1888.
- ^ Seigel (1999), pp. 150–153.
- ^ Seigel, p. 35
Bibliography
- Seigel, Jerrold (1999) Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830-1930, JHU Press. ISBN 0-8018-6063-6
- This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Wood, James, ed. (1907). The Nuttall Encyclopædia. London and New York: Frederick Warne.
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Further reading
- Baldick, Robert (1961). The First Bohemian: The Life of Henry Murger. London: Hamish Hamilton.
- Besant, Walter (1893). "Henry Murger." In: Essays and Historiettes. London: Chatto & Windus, pp. 170–196.
- Gauthier, Théophile (1901). "Henry Murger." In: Portraits of the Day. Cambridge: The Jenson Society, pp. 138–147.
- Lelioux, Adrien François; Noël, Léon; and Nadar (1862). Histoire de Mürger: pour a l'histoire de la vraie Bohéme, par Trois Buveurs d'Eau, Paris: Collection Hetzel; includes unpublished letters and verses by Murger.
- Mauris, Maurice (1880). "Henri Murger." In: French Men of Letters. New York: D. Appleton and Company, pp. 89–108.
- McCarthy, Justin (1868). "The Bohemia of Henri Mürger." In: "Con Amore", or Critical Chapters. London: Tinsley Brothers, pp. 208–249.
- Montorgueil, Georges (1928). Henri Murger, Romancier de la Bohème. Paris: Grasset.
- Moss, Arthur, and Evalyn Marvel (1947). The Legend of the Latin Quarter: Henry Mürger and the Birth of Bohemia. London: W.H. Allen & Co..
- Samuels, Maurice (2004). "Introduction." In: The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. vii-xvi.
- Saintsbury, George (1891). "Henry Murger." In: Essays on French Novelists. London: Percival & Co., pp. 381–418.
- Williams, Orlo (1913). Vie de Bohème, a patch of romantic Paris, Boston: R. G. Badger.
External links
- Works by Henri Murger at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about Henri Murger at Internet Archive
- Works by Henri Murger at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- Scènes de la vie de bohème, Charles Léandre, at Gallica Digital Library.