Honoré de Balzac was a renowned French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus, La Comédie humaine, is a sequence of nearly 100 novels and plays that offers a detailed panorama of French life after the fall of Napoléon Bonaparte in 1815.

Balzac is celebrated as a pioneer of realism in European literature, owing to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered portrayal of society. He created multi-faceted characters that are complex, morally ambiguous, and fully human. Even inanimate objects in his works, such as the city of Paris, are imbued with human-like characteristics.

He influenced many notable writers, including Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert, and Henry James, and filmmakers like François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. His works have been adapted into films and continue to inspire writers globally. James famously referred to him as "really the father of us all."

Balzac was an independent thinker from a young age but struggled to adapt to the conventional teaching styles of his grammar school. His ambitions in the business world met with little success, as he attempted various professions such as publisher, printer, businessman, critic, and politician, failing at each.

Throughout his life, Balzac faced numerous health challenges, possibly due to his rigorous writing schedule. Financial and personal dramas often strained his family relationships, and he lost friends over his critical reviews. In 1850, he married Ewelina Hańska, a Polish aristocrat and his long-standing love, but tragically, he died in Paris six months later.