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Honore de Balzac(1799-1850), one of the greatest and most influential of novelists, was born in Tours and educated at the Coll ge de Vend me and the Sorbonne. He began his career as a pseudonymous writer of sensational potboilers before achieving success with a historical novel, The Chouans. Balzac then conceived his great work, La Comedie humaine, an ongoing series of novels in which he set out to offer a complete picture of contemporary society and manners. Always working under an extraordinary burden of debt, Balzac wrote some eighty-five novels in the course of his last twenty years, including such masterpieces as P re Goriot, Eugenie Grandet, Lost Illusions, and Cousin Bette. In 1850, he married Eveline Hanska, a rich Polish woman with whom he had long conducted an intimate correspondence. Three months later he died. Jordan Stumpis a professor of French at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; the author, most recently, of The Other Book- Bewilderments of Fiction; and the translator of some twenty works of (mostly) contemporary French prose by authors such as Marie NDiaye, ric Chevillard, Antoine Volodine, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint. His translation of Claude Simon's The Jardin des Plantes won the French-American Foundation's annual translation prize in 2001. Morris Dicksteinis a distinguished professor emeritus at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the author, most recently, of Dancing in the Dark, a cultural history of the Great Depression, and Why Not Say What Happened, a memoir.
The 19th century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac. --Oscar Wilde Balzac stands signally alone, he is the first and foremost member of his craft.... An imagination of the highest power, an unequalled intensity of vision.... What he did above all was to read the universe, as hard and as loud as he could, into the France of his time. --Henry James I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists, and statisticians put together. --Friedrich Engels In Balzac, every living soul is a weapon loaded to the very muzzle with will. --Charles Baudelaire Balzac was both a greedy child and an indefatigable observer of a greedy age, at once a fantastic and a genius, yet possessing a simple core of common sense. --V. S. Pritchett Balzac was by turns a saint, a criminal, an honest judge, a corrupt judge, a minister, a fob, a harlot, a duchess, and always a genius. --Andr� Maurois
