Henry de Montherlant

Henry de Montherland was a well-known French writer, dramatist and essayist, who was born to a wealthy Catholic royalist family, and had close relations with his mother and his grandmother. He had home teachers and went to the Catholic Collège of Sainte-Croix at Neuilly from 1911-16. He had to leave this school because of his intimate relationship with a younger male pupil. Nevertheless he concealed his homosexual tendencies from the public during his lifetime.

His experiences from WWI were summarized in his autobiographic novel Dream, and after the war he decided to become a writer. His first themes were youth, war, and bullfighting. From 1925 he travelled to Spain and Northern Africa, returning to Paris in the 1930s. His biggest success came with the trilogy Les jeunes filles (The Young Girls) which sold millions of copies and was translated into 13 languages.

In 1940 de Montherlant became a war correspondent and was busy with the International Red Cross between 1942-45. After WWII he devoted himself fully to writing plays. In 1968, he was attacked and beaten in the streets of Paris, from which he was severely injured and blinded in one eye. At the age of 76 he committed suicide, taking a cyanide capsule and shooting himself in the head.