Honoré de Balzac

Born in 1799, Balzac was a willful child who chafed at grammar school and later abandoned law after finding it inhuman and dull. He tried his hand at publishing, printing, business, criticism, politics - failed at each - then turned those defeats into fuel. La Comédie humaine, the sprawling novel sequence that became his magnum opus, reflected his own financial chaos and strained family ties, populated by multi-faceted characters so morally tangled even the minor ones felt fully human. He wrote Paris itself as a character. His keen eye and unfiltered realism shaped Zola, Dickens, Proust, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, James. Health problems dogged him through an intense writing schedule; he married Polish aristocrat Ewelina Hańska in 1850 after years of longing, then died in Paris six months later.