Ambroise Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry (French: [pɔl valeʁi]; 30 October 1871 – 20 July 1945) was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. In addition to his poetry and fiction (drama and dialogues), his interests included aphorisms on art, history, letters, music, and current events.
Valéry was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 12 different years.
Biography
Valéry was born in Sète, a town on the Mediterranean coast of the Hérault, but he was raised in Montpellier, a larger urban center close by. After a traditional Roman Catholic education, he studied law at university and then resided in Paris for most of the remainder of his life, where he was, for a while, part of the circle of Stéphane Mallarmé.
In 1900, he married Jeannine Gobillard, a friend of Stéphane Mallarmé's family, a niece of the painter Berthe Morisot. The wedding was a double ceremony in which the bride's cousin and Berthe Morisot's daughter, Julie Manet, married the painter Ernest Rouart. Valéry and Gobillard had three children: Claude, Agathe and François.
Valéry served as a juror with Florence Meyer Blumenthal in awarding the Prix Blumenthal, a grant given between 1919 and 1954 to young French painters, sculptors, decorators, engravers, writers, and musicians.
Though his earliest publications date from his mid-twenties, Valéry did not become a full-time writer until he was fifty. He briefly earned a living at the Ministry of War before assuming a relatively flexible post as private secretary to the increasingly impaired Edouard Lebey, a former chief executive of the Havas news agency. He held this position for over twenty years, until Lebey's death in 1922.
