The Unknown Masterpiece: La Comédie Humaine: Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu - Paperback

Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), one of the greatest and most influential of novelists, was born in Tours and educated at the Collège Vendôme and the Sorbonne. He began his career as a pseudonymous writer of sensational potboilers before achieving success with a historical novel, The Chouans. Balzac then conceived his great work, The Human Comedy, an ongoing series of novels in which he set out to offer a complete picture of contemporary society and manners. Always working under an extraordinary burden of debt, Balzac wrote some eighty-five novels in the course of his last twenty years, including such masterpieces as Père Goriot, Eugénie Grandet, Lost Illusions, and Cousin Bette. In 1850, he married Eveline Hańska, a rich Polish woman with whom he had long conducted an intimate correspondence. Three months later he died. In addition to The Girl with the Golden Eyes, NYRB Classics publishes The Human Comedy: Selected Stories, The Lily in the Valley, The Memoirs of Two Young Wives, and The Unknown Masterpiece.