Gérard de Nerval

Gérard de Nerval (May 22, 1808 – January 26, 1855) was the nom-de-plume of the French poet, essayist and translator Gérard Labrunie, the most essentially Romantic among French poets.

Works by de Nerval

• Voyage en Orient (1851), resulted from his extended hashish-filled trip of 1842 to Cairo and Beirut. It must have puzzled readers of conventional travel books, for it retells Oriental tales like Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, in terms of the artist and the act of creation.
• Les Nuits d'Octobre (1852)
• Sylvie (1853)
• Les Filles du Feu (1854), a volume of short stories.
• Les Chimères poems appended to Les Filles de Feu, translated by Daniel Mark Epstein
• Aurélie (1855), his fantasy-ridden interior autobiography— "Our dreams are a second life," he wrote— which influenced the Surrealists.
• Promenades et Souvenirs (1854-56)