Honoré de Balzac  

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Honoré de Balzac (May 20, 1799 – August 18, 1850), born Honoré Balzac, was a nineteenth-century French novelist and playwright. His work, much of which is a sequence (or Roman-fleuve) of almost 100 novels and plays collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, is a broad, often satirical panorama of French society, particularly the petite bourgeoisie.

Along with Gustave Flaubert (whose work he influenced), Balzac is generally regarded as a founding father of realism in European literature. Balzac's novels, most of which are farcical comedies, feature a large cast of well-defined characters, and descriptions in exquisite detail of the scene of action. He also presented particular characters in different novels repeatedly, sometimes as main protagonists and sometimes in the background, in order to create the effect of a consistent 'real' world across his novelistic output. He is the pioneer of this style.

Works

Tragic verse

• Cromwell (1819)

Incomplete at time of death

• Le Corsaire (opera)
• Sténie
• Falthurne
• Corsino

Published pseudonymously

As "Lord R'Hoone", in collaboration

• L'Héritière de Birague (1822)
• Jean-Louis (1822)

As "Horace de Saint-Aubin"

• Clotilde de Lusignan (1822)
• Le Centenaire (1822)
• Le Vicaire des Ardennes (1822)
• La Dernière Fée (1823)
• Annette et le Criminal (Argon le Pirate) (1824)
• Wann-Chlore (1826)

Published anonymously

• Du Droit d'aînesse (1824)
• Histoire impartiale des Jésuites (1824)
• Code des gens honnêtes (1826)

Selected titles from La Comédie humaine

• Les Chouans (1829)
• Sarrasine (1830)
• La Peau de chagrin (1830)
• Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu (1831)
• Le Colonel Chabert (1832)
• La Fille aux yeux d'or (1833)
• Eugénie Grandet (1833)
• Le Contrat de mariage (1835)
• Le Père Goriot (1835)
• Le Lys dans la vallée (1835)
• La Rabouilleuse (1842)
• Illusions perdues (I, 1837; II, 1839; III, 1843)
• La Cousine Bette (1846)
• Le Cousin Pons (1847)
• Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1847)

Plays

• L'École des ménages (1839)
• Vautrin (1839)
• Les Ressources de Quinola (1842)
• Paméla Figaud (1842)
• La Marâtre (1848)
• Mercadet ou le faiseur (1848)

Tales

• Contes drolatiques (1832–37)