Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac ( BAL-zak, also US: BAWL-; French: [ɔnɔʁe d(ə) balzak]; born Honoré Balzac; 20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. The novel sequence La Comédie humaine, described as a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his magnum opus.

Due to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multi-faceted characters; even his lesser characters are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. Inanimate objects are imbued with character as well; the city of Paris, a backdrop for much of his writing, takes on many human qualities. His writing influenced many famous writers, including the novelists Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert, Henry James and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and filmmakers François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. Many of Balzac's works have been made into films and his work has served as a framework for other writers. James called him "really the father of us all."