Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac was born in Tours and worked as a printer and publisher before succeeding as a writer. He spent his career on La Comédie humaine, a linked sequence of dozens of novels and stories portraying French society after Napoleon, with books such as Eugénie Grandet and Père Goriot. He wrote through the night on strong coffee and left many works unfinished when he died in 1850. He is regarded as a founder of European realism.