Balzac's Lives

Enter the mind of French literary giant Honor de Balzac with this groundbreaking biography that illuminates the writer’s life and era through close study of the unforgettable characters and places in Balzac’s expansive and inimitable works.

Peter Brook’s Balzac’s Lives is a biography like no other, a vivid and searching portrait of the great novelist that is based on a close examination of the extraordinary characters that throng his work. More than anyone, Balzac invented the nineteenth-century novel, with its interwoven plots and diverse and overlapping realities, political, economic, domestic, psychological; indeed, Oscar Wilde went so far as to say that Balzac invented the nineteenth century It was, in any case, above all the wonderful, unforgettable, extravagant characters he dreamed up and made flesh–entrepreneurs, bankers, inventors, industrialists, poets, artists, bohemians of both sexes, journalists, aristocrats, politicians, prostitutes–that allowed Balzac to bring to life the dynamic forces of the new era that ushered in our own. Brooks singles out the capitalist Gobseck, the aspiring writer Lucien de Rubembr , the ambitious politican Rastignac, the gay criminal mastermind, Collin, among others, to disclose the secret workings of a great writer’s inner world.