Short answers, pulled from the story.
Joseph Maurice Ravel was born on the 7th of March 1875 in Ciboure, a small Basque town near the Spanish border. His family moved to Paris three months after his birth, where his younger brother Édouard was also born.
Maurice Ravel was expelled from the Paris Conservatoire in 1895 and again in 1900 after winning no more prizes and holding a musically and politically progressive outlook. The Director, Théodore Dubois, deplored his views, and a national scandal known as l'affaire Ravel erupted when Ravel was eliminated from the Prix de Rome competition in 1905.
Around 1900 Maurice Ravel joined an informal group known as Les Apaches, or The Hooligans, which included innovative young artists, poets, critics, and musicians. The group met regularly until the beginning of the First World War and included members such as Igor Stravinsky and Manuel de Falla.
Maurice Ravel tried to join the French Air Force but was rejected due to his age and a minor heart complaint. He eventually joined the Thirteenth Artillery Regiment as a lorry driver in March 1915, driving munitions at night under heavy German bombardment.
Boléro was conceived as a symphonic poem without a subject where the whole interest lies in the rhythm and lasts seventeen minutes. Maurice Ravel stated that the work was one long, very gradual crescendo with no contrasts and practically no invention except the plan and the manner of the execution.
Maurice Ravel died on the 28th of December 1937, at the age of 62, following a coma after surgery for a cerebral condition. He was interred next to his parents in a granite tomb at Levallois-Perret cemetery on the 30th of December 1937.