Honoré de Balzac (1799-1851), novelist, playwright, literary and art critic, essayist, journalist, and French printer, is considered one of the great writers of realism. Born in Tours, in 1814 he moved to Paris, where he studied law and began working in a law firm, but his love for literature drove him to abandon his career and dedicate himself to writing. He undertook several businesses, which ended in failure and left him in debt. With The Last Chouan (1829), he achieved great success. From then on, he began a feverish activity, writing, among others, The Physiology of Marriage (1829) and The Wild Ass's Skin (1831), with which he began to consolidate his prestige. In 1834, Balzac, a tireless worker, conceived the idea of making an exhaustive portrait of French society of his time by having the same characters appear in different stories, which began to give his work a unitary sense under the title of The Human Comedy, to which belong titles such as Eugénie Grandet (1833), Father Goriot (1835), Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans (1838-1847) or Cousin Bette (1846), although of the 137 novels that were to make it up, fifty remained incomplete. An extraordinary writer, capable of deploying in his works sublime reflections and ideas, creating an interesting story with strong social criticism through exquisite prose of great poetic level and philosophical depth, Balzac is considered the founder of the modern novel.
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