Biography
Goncourt was born in Nancy. He bequeathed his entire estate for the foundation and maintenance of the Académie Goncourt. In honour of his brother and collaborator, Jules de Goncourt, (December 17, 1830 – June 20, 1870), each December since 1903, the Académie awards the Prix Goncourt. It is the most prestigious prize in French language literature, given to "the best imaginary prose work of the year".
Marcel Proust, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Tournier, Marguerite Duras and Romain Gary (who exceptionally won it twice) are among the best-known authors who have won the century-old prize.
Edmond de Goncourt died in Champrosay in 1896, and was interred in the Cimetière de Montmartre in Paris.
Read more about this topic: Edmond De Goncourt
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)