Henri Mitterand

Henri Mitterand (7 August 1928 – 8 October 2021) was a French academic, author, critic, and editor.

He was a specialist on the works of Émile Zola, one of the founders of sociological criticism in France.

Mitterand graduated from the École normale supérieure with a degree in literature in 1948 and became an associate professor at the school in 1951.

He was Pensionary of the Fondation Thiers from 1952 to 1955 and earned a doctorate in literature in 1959.

From 1964 to 1987, he directed Les Cahiers naturalistes, devoted to the life and study of the works of Zola and the history of the Dreyfus affair.

He received several prizes from the Académie Française and was a member of multiple academies and societies.

Henri Mitterand died in Paris on 8 October 2021 at the age of 93.

He was a professor at Paris 8 University Vincennes-Saint-Denis from 1968 to 1978, at Sorbonne Nouvelle University Paris 3 from 1978 to 1990, and at Columbia University from 1989 to 2004.

He was a professor emeritus at Sorbonne Nouvelle and Columbia and had also taught at Saarland University, Stanford University, the University of Toronto, the Université du Québec à Montréal, the Università degli Studi di Napoli "L'Orientale", and Philadelphia University.

He lectured at over seventy universities across Europe, North America, North Africa, the Middle East, and India.

Mitterand devoted many of his books and articles to the works of Émile Zola, as well as other writers of the 19th and 20th Centuries.

He compiled Zola's Œuvres complètes.