Maurice Maeterlinck, the greatest symbolist playwright of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was born on August 29, 1862, in Ghent, Belgium. He studied law and worked as a lawyer until 1889, when he decided to devote himself to writing. In 1897, Maeterlinck went to Paris, where he met many of the leading symbolist writers of the day. His first play, La Princesse Maleine (The Princess Maleine), was sent to major French symbolist poet and critic Mallarmé and became an immediate success. Another of his plays, L’Oiseau bleu (The Blue Bird), was an international success and has been adapted several times as a children’s book and a major motion picture. The phrase “the bluebird of happiness” derives from this enormously popular and enduring story. Maeterlinck won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1911. He died of a heart attack on May 6, 1949, in Nice, France.