Benoît Ness taught 19th and 20th-century literature for over thirty years and was the Director of the French Literature Institute at the University of Strasbourg. After meeting the writer towards the end of his life, he began in 1975 the “defense and illustration” of Henri Bosco’s work; after serving for a long time as Secretary-General of the Henri Bosco Friendship Association, he became its President in 2007.
His lecture traces Henri Bosco’s journey from Morocco to Provence and takes us, through a few selected stories, in the footsteps of this writer passionately in love with the Mediterranean.
Who was Henri Bosco? Henri Bosco was born in 1888 in Avignon, to a Provençal and Piedmontese family. His father, Louis Bosco, was a stonemason, a luthier, and a highly talented tenor from whom he inherited great musicality and a taste for imaginative storytelling. Writing stories from a young age, Henri Bosco later studied at the University of Grenoble and the French Institute of Florence. With a degree in Italian, he went on to teach the language in his hometown, then in Bourg-en-Bresse, Philippeville (in Algeria), and Rabat (in Morocco).
In his first novel, “Pierre Lampé Douze,” published in 1924, one can already find the entire atmosphere of his future works: the mystery mingled with everyday reality, the rural world imbued with ancestral beliefs, and the magic of Provence, all permeated with an overflowing and delightful imagination that contributes to the enchanting power of his writing.
His work was awarded numerous literary prizes, such as the Grand Prize for Literature from the French Academy in 1968. Today, books like “L’âne culotte,” “Malicroix,” “L’enfant et la rivière,” or “L’homme de Sivergues” are still reissued and remain bookstore successes.
After spending the last 30 years of his life in Nice, Henri Bosco passed away there in 1975, after being made an honorary citizen.
