Maurice Dekobra

Maurice Dekobra (26 May 1885, Paris – 1 June 1973, Paris) was a French writer. His real name was Ernest-Maurice Tessier. Viewed as a subversive writer in the 1920s and 1930s, he became one of the best-known French writers between the First and the Second World Wars. His books have been translated into 77 languages, and he has been described as an early example of an international best-seller writer. This is particularly true of his best known work, La Madone des Sleepings (1925). In spite of this, and the publication of a biography by Philippe Collas in 2001, he was declared a "total unknown" in 2005, though the republication of La Madone des Sleepings by the publisher Zulma in 2006 has increased awareness of him, at least in France. At the age of 19, he started his career as a trilingual journalist – French, English, German. During the 1914–18 War he was attached as liaison officer/interpreter first to the Indian army, and later to the United States army. The contacts he made at th...