Taymur, Mahmud

Born June 16, 1894, in Cairo; died Aug. 25, 1973, in Switzerland. Arab (Egyptian) writer. Member of the Academy for the Arabic Language in Cairo.

Taymur was one of the founders of the Egyptian realistic short story. He studied at the Higher Agricultural School, and began publishing in 1920. Taymur’s early works were influenced by Chekhov and Maupassant. His short stories of the 1920’s and 1930’s portrayed various social strata in Egypt. Taymur’s prose is marked by humanism and psychological subtlety. In the late 1930’s and in the 1940’s his prose was influenced by symbolism, as seen in the collection of short stories Call of the Unknown (1939). After the revolutionary coup of 1952, Taymur’s works were predominantly realistic. He wrote the socially oriented novels Shumrukh (1958) and Blue Lanterns (1960; Russian translation, 1970), collections of short stories and plays, and works on the history and theory of literature.