Francis Steegmuller
Francis Steegmuller (July 3, 1906 – October 20, 1994) was an American biographer, translator, and fiction writer, best known as a scholar of Gustave Flaubert. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, he graduated from Columbia University in 1927. He wrote many short stories and articles for The New Yorker and published under the pen names Byron Steel and David Keith. He won two National Book Awards: in 1971 for Cocteau: A Biography (Arts and Letters) and in 1981 for The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830-1857 (translation of Flaubert's selected letters). He also received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal.
His first wife, Beatrice Stein, was a painter connected to Jacques Villon; she died in 1961. He married writer Shirley Hazzard in 1963. His papers are held at Yale University (the James Jackson Jarves Papers and the Francis Steegmuller Collection for Jacques Villon) and at Columbia University (Francis Steegmuller Papers 1877–1979). He died in Naples, Italy.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 05:06 (CET).