Naguib Mahfouz has written over one hundred short stories during his career, sixteen of which are published together in one volume, with his most famous allegorical work, Half a Day, also takes on the mantle of title.
Half a Day is an exceptionally short story, barely longer than an essay, that tells the story of a male narrator who goes to school as a small child in the morning and is an old man by the time he goes home at the end of the day. The tale is so heavily allegorical that it is impossible to really understand it unless each of the elements within it is given some greater interpretive meaning. The main allegorical motif of the story is that a morning spent in school is like a lifetime spent at the university of life. Like most of Mahfouz's work, the tale draws heavily on shared experiences that translate easily between different cultures.
Half a Day is Mahfouz's best known short story not just because it is believed to be his best, but because it was the first to be published after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. Before being awarded this prestigious honor, none of his work had been translated into English; written in his native Arabic, much of his work had not even been published outside of Egypt. After receiving the award, he swiftly gained international recognition as one of the most important international writers of the twentieth century.
This story was published in two earlier collections of his stories; The False Dawn in 1991, and The Time and the Place, in the late 1990s.
Despite his acclaim as a writer, Mahfouz did not always want to become one, and spent much of his adult life in the political world working as a bureaucrat. The subject of an assassination attempt in 1994, he was singled out for death by an Islamic group who believed that one of the novels he had written thirteen years earlier was blasphemous; he survived the attack but became even more private, but released an autobiography later that year,
