Name Victor Sejour | Role Writer | |
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Books Le Mulatre, The Jew of Seville | ||
How to pronounce victor s jour french france pronouncenames com
Juan Victor Séjour Marcou et Ferrand (2 June 1817 – 20 September 1874) was an American expatriate writer who worked in France. Though mostly unknown to later American writers, his short story "Le Mulâtre" ("The Mulatto") is the earliest known work of fiction by a Creole author.
Contents
- How to pronounce victor s jour french france pronouncenames com
- Life
- The Brown Overcoat 1858
- References
Life
On June 2, 1817 Juan Victor Séjour was born in New Orleans to François Marcou, a free mulatto father from Saint-Domingue (Haiti), and Eloisa Philippe Ferrand, a New Orleans quadroon. His parents were wealthy, and had him educated in a private school. At the age of nineteen he moved to Paris to continue his education and find work. There he met members of the Parisian literary elite, including Cyrille Bissette, publisher of the black-owned journal La Revue des Colonies. Bisette published "Le Mulâtre", Séjour's first work, in 1837. The story of a loyal slave exacting revenge on his cruel master/father for the death of his wife, "Le Mulâtre" contains an indictment of New World slavery that is found in none of Séjour's subsequent work.
Séjour then turned away from written fiction, and composed an ode to Napoleon in 1841 and the verse drama The Jew of Seville in 1844. The latter cemented his reputation as a playwright; he went on to write Richard III, a Shakespeare-inspired costume drama about Richard III of England that became his most acclaimed work. Towards the end of his life, however, Séjour's plays fell out of favor, resulting in a decline in his status.
Written in French, "Le Mulâtre" had little effect on American literature, and was not even translated into English until the late 20th century. Its condemnation of slavery, however, anticipates the work of later African-American writers such as Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown.