French author of Belgian origin, born in Brussels. Her mother died the same year due to puerperal fever. Marguerite was raised alone by the father, the Frenchman Michel de Crayencourt, an aristocratic cosmopolitan who loved women and to play high. He was also an educated man who gave his daughter a both classical and individualistic education. Together with him, she discovered England and Italy, and learned Greek, Latin, and English. Everything she learned, she gathered freely and passionately, not infrequently during travels, a schooling which by time would bear fruit in Yourcenar’s unique feeling for language and for foreign and historically distant worlds of ideas and mentalities. During her early teenage years, she wrote poems whose publication her father paid for. It was for one of these early collections of poems that she chose the pen name Yourcenar, a sort of anagram of her family name, Crayencourt. The death of her father in 1929 coincided with the publication of his daughter’s first book that was published by a publisher, Alexis (Alexis ou Le traité du vain combat), where she establishes one central theme of her authorship: homosexuality. Thanks to a small fortune left by her father, she could for ten years lead a life without both geographic and family ties, a life full of travels, especially in Greece, and a multifaceted literary activity (translations, short stories, plays, literary criticism). In 1939 she decided to leave Europe with its feverish preparations for war and head for New York. What initially had been intended as a mere visit was transformed into permanent residency by the war, and in 1947 Yourcenar applied for American citizenship. During a few dark years, when she was troubled by doubts about her future as an author, she taught French and Italian at a girls’ college in New York. In 1951, she and her friend, the American Grace Frick, bought a house on Mont Desert Island in the state of Maine and named it Petite Plaisance. This became Yourcenar’s fixed point until the death of her friend in 1979, when she resumed her nomadic lifestyle with travels to Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Egypt, Kenya, and finally India. Marguerite Yourcenar died in 1987 at a hospital in Northeast Harbor in Maine.