Facts about Honoré de Balzac
- Honoré de Balzac is known worldwide for the novels and shorter works of fiction he collected under the title La Comedie humaine (The Human Comedy), which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon..
- The aim of Balzac in this great work was to describe all of French society.
- Honoré de Balzac was born on May 20, 1799, in Tours, where his father, Bernard-François Balssa, was a civil servant.
- At the age of 8, Balzac was sent to boarding school. He was an undisciplined child. and he was often sent to detention, or ''kept in." He looked on this punishment as a blessing in disguise because it gave him time for reading.
- Balzac's first play, Cromwell (1819), was a failure. He turned to writing sensational novels under various pen names.
- In 1829, Balzac started the novels that made him famous. Some were fantastic, like The Wild Ass's Skin (1831). This novel tells how a young man acquires a magic piece of leather that grants his every wish but shrinks a little every time he uses it.
- Others novels were realistic, like Eugénie Grandet (1833), the story of a miser who loves his gold more than his daughter.
- Honoré de Balzac lived extravagantly, and he was always in debt.
- Just before his death, Balzac married a Polish countess, Eveline Hanska.
- Balzac suffered from health problems throughout his life, maybe due to his intense writing schedule.
- By writing as much as 16 hours a day, Balzac published over 80 titles between 1829 and 1847.
- Balzac died in Paris on August 18,1850.
- His writing influenced many subsequent novelists such as Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Marie Corelli, William Faulkner, Henry James, Jack Kerouac, and Italo Calvino.
