Alphonse Daudet was a French short-story writer and novelist, now remembered chiefly as the author of sentimental tales of provincial life in the south of France.

Life

Daudet was the son of a silk manufacturer. In 1849 his father had to sell his factory and move to Lyon. Alphonse wrote his first poems and his first novel at age 14. In 1857 his parents lost all their money, and Daudet had to give up his hopes of matriculating. His work as an usher at a school at Alès for six unhappy months culminated in his dismissal but later furnished the theme, with embellishments and omissions, for his semiautobiographical novel Le Petit Chose (1868; “The Little Thing”). At the end of the year he joined his elder brother, Ernest, in Paris.