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French novelist, one of the creators of Realism in literature. His Human Comedy (La Comédie humaine) spanned more than 90 novels and short stories in an attempt to comprehend and depict the realities of life in modern bourgeois France
Outweighing Balzac’s faults—his lack of literary style, his moralizing, his tendency toward melodrama—are his originality, his great powers of observation, and his vivid imagination. His short stories include some of the best in the language, but his attempts at drama failed. Though an unattractive, awkward man, Balzac formed several famous liaisons. Only a few months before his death he married the Polish Countess Evelina Hanska, with whom he had conducted a romantic correspondence for 18 years. From The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. Copyright © 2003 Columbia University Press
Reading
Les Chouans (1829, first published as Le Dernier Chouan)
La Peau de chagrin (1831)
La Comédie humaine
Louis Lambert (1832)
Eugénie Grandet (1833)
La Recherche de l’absolu (1834)
Le Père Goriot (1835)
Les Illusions perdues (1837)
César Birotteau (1837)
La Cousine Bette (1847)
Le Cousin Pons (1847)
Writing available on the net
- Project Gutenberg editions of Balzac's works (http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/author?name=Balzac%2c%20Honore%20de)
- The University of Adelaide http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/aut/balzac.html
- Other etext editions (via Online Books Page)
Commentaries
Full text of the biography Honore de Balzac (http://www.gutenberg.net/etext/3625) by Albert Keim
- Balzac, by Frederick Lawton [ read | download ]
- Honore de Balzac, by Albert Keim and Louis Lumet [ read | download ]
- Women in the Life of Balzac, by Juanita Helm Floyd [ read | download ]
See The Human Comedy (with introductions by G. Saintsbury, 40 vol., 1895–98); Balzac’s Letters to His Family, 1809–1850 (ed. by W. S. Hastings, 1934); biographies by H. J. Hunt (1957, repr. 1969), A. Maurois (1966, repr. 1983), and G. Robb (1994); studies by C. Prendergast (1979) and R. Butler (1983); bibliography and index comp. by W. H. Royce (1929, repr. 1969)
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