Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright whose main work, the sequence La Comédie humaine, gives a panorama of French life after Napoleon's fall. Known for close attention to detail, he is regarded as one of the founders of realism, and Paris itself takes on a personality across his pages. Among his books are Eugénie Grandet, a novel about a young woman living under a miserly father, and Père Goriot, part of La Comédie humaine. He died in 1850.