Born July 8, 1621, in Château-Thierry, Champagne, present-day department of Aisne; died Apr. 13, 1695, in Paris. French poet. Elected to the Académie Française in 1684.

La Fontaine’s family belonged to the bureaucratic bourgeoisie. His first literary work was an adaptation of Terence’s comedy The Eunuch (1654). La Fontaine composed the narrative poem Adonis (1658), the dramatic eclogue Climène (c. 1658), the poetic fragments Dream in Vaux (1658–61), madrigals, epistles, and ballads in the précieux style. When the royal favorite, Fouquet, was arrested, La Fontaine expressed sympathy for him in the elegy “To the Nymphs in Vaux” (1662) and in the “Ode to the King . . .” (1663). As a result, the poet was sent away to Limoges.

Concessions to the précieux school are interspersed with pages of inspired poetry in the chivalrous novella The Love of Psyche and Cupid (1669; Russian translation, 1964). Of particular importance are the racy Tales and Stories in Verse (books 1–5, 1665–85) and the famous Fables (books 1–6, 1668; books 7–11, 1678–79). In these works, La Fontaine emerged as an outstanding satirist, freethinker (close to the materialist doctrines of P. Gassendi), and heir to Renaissance traditions in literature.

A new surge of creativity is evident in the narrative poem Philemon and Baucis (1685) and even more so in the Epistle to Huet, Bishop of Soissons (1687), in which La Fontaine actively entered into the dispute between “the ancients and the moderns” upholding the superiority of ancient over contemporary writers.

In 1694, La Fontaine published the last book of the Fables, to which he owes his fame as one of the greatest popular poets of France. The distinguishing features of his works, which won him a unique place among classicists, are revealed most clearly in the Fables: an interest in the “lower” genres, a reliance on popular wisdom and folklore, a profoundly national inspiration, and a proclivity for allegory and irony. Although he used classical models (Aesop and Phaedrus), the works of Indian fabulists, and folk traditions of the animal epos, La Fontaine overcame the didacticism of his predecessors. Displaying a splendid mastery of laconic composition and a virtuosity in free verse, La Fontaine dramatized the fable and, especially in the collections written in the 1670’s, greatly broadened its possibilities as a realistic descriptive form. Russian fabulists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, particularly I. A. Krylov, took advantage of the fable’s potential as a realistic literary form.