Henry Bataille
French, 1872 - 1922
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Félix-Henri "Henry" Bataille was a French dramatist and poet. His works were popular between 1900 and the start of World War I.
Bataille's parents died when he was young. He attended the École des Beaux-Arts and Académie Julian to study painting, but started writing when he was 14. Henry wrote plays and poems, but after the success of his second play, La Lépreuse, he became a playwright exclusively. Bataille's early works explored the effects of passion on human motivation and how stifling the social conventions of the times could be. For example, Maman Colibri, is about a middle-aged woman's affair with a younger man. Later, Bataille would gravitate towards the theater of ideas and social drama.
Bataille was also a theorist of subconscious motivation. While he did not use his theories in most of his own works, he influenced later playwrights such as Jean-Jacques Bernard and the "school of silence".
