Balzac - A Life (Paperback)

A New York Times Editors' Choice of the Best Books of 1994.

In the first major English biography of Honoré de Balzac for over fifty years, Graham Robb has produced a compelling portrait of the great French novelist whose powers of creation were matched only by his self-destructive tendencies. As colorful as the world he described, Balzac is the perfect subject for biography: a relentless seducer whose successes were as spectacular as his catastrophes; a passionate collector, inventor, explorer, and political campaigner; a mesmerizing storyteller with the power to make his fantasies come true.

Balzac's early life was a struggle against literary disappointment and poverty, and he learned his trade by writing a series of lurid commercial novels. Robb shows how Balzac's craving for wealth, fame, and happiness produced a series of harebrained entrepreneurial schemes that took him to the remotest parts of Europe and into a love affair with a Polish countess whom he courted for fifteen years by correspondence. Out of these experiences emerged some of the finest novels in the Realist tradition.

Skillfully interweaving the life with the novels, Robb presents Balzac as one of the great tragicomic heroes of the nineteenth century, a man whose influence both in and outside his native France has been, and still is, immense.

• "Witty and admirably succinct...the prose consistently sparkles with epigrammatic polish."—Washington Post
• "Compendious and readable....[Robb] shares Balzac's love of anecdote, of color and of human interest."—New York Times Book Review
• "Splendid...meticulously researched, lovingly put together, and beautifully told."—Richard Marius, author of Thomas More: A Biography