Valéry, Paul

French author born and grown up in the southern French port of Sète, where his father was a customs officer. Through his parents, Valéry was of both Corsican and Italian stock and would all his life feel intimately connected with the Mediterranean region. His precocious intelligence gave him a special position among his friends during his upper secondary school years in Montpellier, and already as an 18-year-old, he published formally assured poems inspired by Symbolism and its central figure, Stéphane Mallarmé, with whom he started a correspondence.