Honore de Balzac

Honore de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright whose novel sequence La Comedie humaine, a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his magnum opus. Prized for his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, he is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature, renowned for multi-faceted characters in which even minor figures are complex and morally ambiguous. His writing influenced many later novelists, including Emile Zola, Charles Dickens, Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Henry James called him really the father of us all.