Honoré de Balzac Quote of The Week From Greg Bover

October 27, 2011
"Behind every great fortune there is a crime."
Honoré de Balzac (1799 – 1850)

Balzac is often considered the founder of European Realist Literature. His attention to detail and his multi-faceted characters have served as an inspiration to generations of writers, including Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Proust, Poe, Faulkner, Kerouac, and Calvino. His masterwork, Le Comédie Humaine, or The Human Comedy, is a series of sketches of all aspects of life, often presented minute by minute. Although a conservative royalist in his politics, Balzac understood the frustrations of the down-trodden and the revolutionaries in the great social upheavals of his later life.

Greg Bover

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