Georges Simenon (edit name/settings)

One of the most significant figures in twentieth-century European literature, Georges Joseph Christian Simenon was born February 13, 1903, in Liege, Belgium. At age sixteen, he began work as a reporter for a local newspaper. In 1922 he moved to Paris to embark on a career as a novelist. His most well-known creation is the pipe-smoking Commissaire Jules Maigret, featured in seventy-five novels and twenty-eight short stories, which have been translated into over fifty languages. Maigret has been portrayed in film and on television by such venerable actors as Jean Renoir, Rupert Davies, and Michael Gambon. Notable fans of his work include T. S. Eliot, Henry Miller, and Andre Gide. Simenon died in 1989 in Lausanne, Switzerland, at ate 86.