Happy birthday, Guy de Maupassant

It is the birthday of French writer Guy de Maupassant (1850), who is credited with helping to develop the literary form of the short story. He wrote more than 300 short stories as well as a poetry collection, three travel books, and six novels. Perhaps his most famous short story was Dumpling (1880), a story set during the Franco-Prussian War. It tells of a group of travelers on their way to La Havre by stagecoach. The story is included in de Maupassant’s collection Dumpling and Other Stories of the War. John Ford’s film Stagecoach (1939) was heavily influenced by de Maupassant’s story.

Happy birthday, film director John Ford

It is the birthday of acclaimed Hollywood director John Ford (1894), who is considered one of the best film directors of all time. He won six Academy Awards, four of them for best director. Those films included The Informer (1935), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), and The Quiet Man (1952). He also won for the documentary feature The Battle of Midway (1942) and for the documentary short December 7th (1943). His admirers include Ingmar Bergman, who called him the best director in the world, Frank Capra, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Elia Kazan, David Lean, Sergio, Leone, Jean Renoir, Martin Scorsese, Stephen Spielberg, François Truffaut, Orson Welles, and Wim Wenders. Here is a fascinating 1968 BBC interview with him.