About Honore De Balzac
Honore De Balzac, (1799-1850), French novelist, born in Tours, and educated at a school of the Oratorian Order in Vendome. At his father’s insistence, he studied law in Paris from 1818 to 1821. After being licensed to practice law, he chose to embark on a literary career despite his fathers objections. From 1822 to 1829 he turned out bad plays and melodramatic novels which showed very little promise. Honore De Balzac ventured into the publishing and printing business in 1825. For three tears he struggled to make a success of it, but when he finally withdrew he had incurred debts which were to plague him the rest of his life.
In 1829 Honore De Balzac produced his first important novel, Le Dernier Chouan, later called Les Chouwans, a story based on the struggle in Brittany between the Royalist and Republicans during the French Revolution. Although the novel retained some of the faults of his earlier works, it was far superior in quality and signaled Balzac’s maturation as a writer. An indefatigable worker, he produced about 95 novels and many short stories, plays, and journalistic pieces within the next twenty years.
In 1834 Honore De Balzac conceived the idea welding his novels, completed and projected, into one mammoth continuum entitled La Comedie Humaine. |
