The son of a civil servant, Honoré de Balzac was born in 1799 in Tours, France. After attending boarding school in Vendôme, he gravitated to Paris where he worked as a legal clerk and a hack writer, using various pseudonyms, often in collaboration with other writers. Balzac turned exclusively to fiction at the age of thirty and went on to write a large number of novels and short stories set amid turbulent nineteenth-century France. He entitled his collective works The Human Comedy. Along with Victor Hugo and Dumas père and fils, Balzac was one of the pillars of French romantic literature. He died in 1850, shortly after his marriage to the Polish countess Evelina Hanska, his lover of eighteen years.
Find Books by Honore de Balzac
This is the "delightful" (People) New York Times bestseller that's earned raves from reviewers everywhere is the story of three sisters who love each other, but just don't happen to like each other very much…
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In the new novel from the author of Last Night at the Lobster, a middle-age couple goes all in for love at a Niagara Falls casino. Get the reading group guide.