Short answers, pulled from the story.
Edgar Degas was born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas on the 19th of July 1834. He was the oldest of five children raised in Paris by a father who expected him to follow a conventional path and a mother who died when he was only thirteen.
Edgar Degas rejected the label of Impressionism because he insisted that he was a realist who found no art less spontaneous than his own. He believed that the artist must live alone and his private life must remain unknown, which turned him into a self-imposed exile from the social circles he once navigated.
Edgar Degas exhibited The Little Dancer of Fourteen Years in 1881, which provoked a strong reaction from critics who found its realism extraordinary but denounced the dancer as ugly. J.-K. Huysmans wrote that the terrible reality of this statuette produced uneasiness in the spectators and overturned all their notions about sculpture.
Edgar Degas's eye problems deteriorated further after 1890, yet he continued to work in pastel as late as the end of 1907 and is believed to have continued making sculptures as late as 1910. He apparently ceased working in 1912 when the impending demolition of his longtime residence on the rue Victor Massé forced him to move to quarters on the Boulevard de Clichy.
By the mid-1890s, Edgar Degas had broken off relations with all of his Jewish friends and publicly disavowed his previous friendships with Jewish artists due to the Dreyfus Affair. He remained an outspoken anti-Semite and member of the anti-Semitic Anti-Dreyfusards until his death.
Edgar Degas died in September 1917 after spending the last years of his life nearly blind and restlessly wandering the streets of Paris. He never married and lived in quarters on the Boulevard de Clichy following his move from the rue Victor Massé in 1912.