At least partly because of this unfortunate prejudice, Maupassant usually has not been ranked with the most illustrious of France's nineteenth-century prose writers--Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Emile Zola--although one could easily defend the claim that he is France's best-known author outside France. His short fiction has been compared to that of Ivan Turgenev and Anton Chekhov, Edgar Allan Poe and Henry James. Among the authors outside of France who were influenced by him are Rudyard Kipling, August Strindberg, Joseph Conrad, William Sydney Porter (O. Henry), Somerset Maugham, William Saroyan, and Gabriele D'Annunzio. Although various labels have been affixed to him ("realist," "naturalist"), he steadfastly refused identification with any literary movement. Nourished by his reading of Arthur Schopenhauer and tutored in the writer's art by Flaubert, Maupassant took as his primary goal the realistic portrayal of everyday life. He wrote about what he knew best: the peasants of his native Normandy, the war of 1870, the lives of government employees and of Parisian high society, and his own fears and hallucinations.
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