The Thirteen

Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist, playwright, and one of the commanding figures of nineteenth-century European realism. Born in 1799, he devoted his career to an enormous interlinked fictional project, La Comédie humaine, a panoramic study of French society after the fall of Napoleon. Across novels, novellas, and stories, Balzac examined money, ambition, class mobility, law, journalism, marriage, inheritance, provincial life, and the moral pressures of modern society with a force that helped shape the development of the realist novel.Balzac's work influenced generations of novelists because of its density of social observation, psychological force, and extraordinary attention to the machinery of everyday life. In novels such as Eugenie Grandet, Père Goriot, Lost Illusions, and Cousin Bette, he showed how private emotion is entangled with property, status, debt, family strategy, and social performance. His fiction remains essential to readers of French literature, classic European fiction, nineteenth-century realism, social criticism, and the history of the modern novel.