Penguin.com (usa)

About Honore de Balzac
Books by Honore de Balzac
Author, Honore de Balzac - Louis Boulanger - Musee de Tours ?Roger-Viollet, Paris
Image Information

Honore de Balzac

About Honore de Balzac

An Interview with Honore de Balzac

More About Honore de Balzac

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

Sign Up
  • Penguin Newsletter

Sign up for the Penguin newsletter here»

Send this page to a friend
Author Image: Honore de Balzac - Louis Boulanger - Musee de Tours ?Roger-Viollet, Paris

The Weird Sisters Book Cover image
$15.00 | buy now

The Weird Sisters

Eleanor Brown

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…
Read the author interview.

The Odds Book Cover image
$25.95 | buy now

The Odds

Stewart O'Nan

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.