One of the greatest European novelists of the 19 th century.He described his many novels as the Human Comedy;'the history of the human race traced thread by thread'.
Born in Tours in 1799 Balzac wrote hundred of books and many thousands of letters, articles and reviews. Fuelled by black coffee, driving by ambition and battling against constant debt, he laboured long into the night for months on end, methodically folding his life into art. He consumed acres of paper and lakes of ink as he fashioned a version of the society and culture in which he moved.He died in 1850, totally exhausted.