Gustave Flaubert

Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon. Due to his keen observation of detail and... unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multifaceted characters, who are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. His writing influenced many subsequent novelists such as Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gustave Flaubert, Marie Corelli, Henry James, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, and Italo Calvino, and philosophers such as Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. Many of Balzac's works have been made into or have inspired films, and they are a continuing source of inspiration for writers, filmmakers and critics. An enthusiastic reader and independent thinker as a child, Balzac had trouble adapting to the teaching style of his grammar school.
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , 28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832 was a German writer, pictorial artist, biologist, theoretical physicist, and polymath. He is considered the supreme genius of modern German literature. His works span the fields of poetry, drama, prose, philosophy, and science. His... Faust has been called one of the greatest dramatic works of modern European literature. His other well-known literary works include his numerous poems, the Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, and the epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. Goethe was one of the key figures of German literature and the movement of Weimar Classicism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; this movement coincides with Enlightenment, Sentimentalism , Sturm und Drang and Romanticism. The author of the scientific text Theory of Colours, his influential ideas on plant and animal morphology and homology were extended and developed by 19th century naturalists including Charles Darwin. He also served at length as the Privy Councilor of the duchy of Saxe-Weimar. In politics Goethe was conservative.
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François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand was a French writer, politician, diplomat and historian. He is considered the founder of Romanticism in French literature. Descended from an old Breton aristocratic family, Chateaubriand was a royalist by political disposition and in an age when a... significant part of the intelligentsia was turning against the Church, authored the Génie du christianisme in defence of the Catholic faith. Born in Saint-Malo, the last of ten children, Chateaubriand grew up in his family's castle in Combourg, Brittany. His father, René de Chateaubriand , was a former sea captain turned ship owner and slave trader. His mother's maiden name was Apolline de Bedée. Chateaubriand's father was a morose, uncommunicative man and the young Chateaubriand grew up in an atmosphere of gloomy solitude, only broken by long walks in the Breton countryside and an intense friendship with his sister Lucile. Chateaubriand was educated in Dol, Rennes and Dinan.
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Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was a Russian novelist, short story writer, and playwright. His first major publication, a short story collection entitled A Sportsman's Sketches, is a milestone of Russian Realism, and his novel Fathers and Sons is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century... fiction. Turgenev was born into a wealthy landed family of the Russian aristocracy in Oryol, Russia, on November 9, 1818 . His father, Sergei Nikolaevich Turgenev, a colonel in the Imperial Russian cavalry, was a chronic philanderer. Ivan's mother, Varvara Petrovna Lutovinova, was a wealthy heiress, who had had an unhappy childhood and suffered in her marriage. Ivan's father died when Ivan was sixteen, leaving him and his brother Nicholas to be brought up by their abusive mother. Ivan's childhood was a lonely one, in constant fear of his mother who beat him often.
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Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was a Russian novelist, short story writer, and playwright. His first major publication, a short story collection... entitled A Sportsman's Sketches, is a milestone of Russian Realism, and his novel Fathers and Sons is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century fiction. Turgenev was born into a wealthy landed family of the Russian aristocracy in Oryol, Russia, on November 9, 1818 . His father, Sergei Nikolaevich Turgenev, a colonel in the Imperial Russian cavalry, was a chronic philanderer. Ivan's mother, Varvara Petrovna Lutovinova, was a wealthy heiress, who had had an unhappy childhood and suffered in her marriage. Ivan's father died when Ivan was sixteen, leaving him and his brother Nicholas to be brought up by their abusive mother. Ivan's childhood was a lonely one, in constant fear of his mother who beat him often.
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Émile François Zola was a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to... the development of theatrical naturalism. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus, which is encapsulated in the renowned newspaper headline J'Accuse. Zola was born in Paris in 1840. His father, François Zola , was an Italian engineer. With his French wife Émilie Aurélie Aubert, the family moved to Aix-en-Provence in the southeast, when Émile was three years old. Four years later in 1847, his father died leaving his mother on a meager pension. In 1858 the Zolas moved to Paris, where Émile's childhood friend Paul Cézanne soon joined him. Zola started to write in the romantic style. His widowed mother had planned a law career for Émile but he failed his Baccalauréat examination. Before his breakthrough as a writer, Zola worked as a clerk in a shipping firm and then in the sales department for a publisher .
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Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin Dudevant , best known by her pseudonym George Sand , was a French novelist and memoirist. Sand's father, Maurice... Dupin, was the grandson of the Marshal General of France, Maurice, Comte de Saxe, himself an illegitimate son of Augustus II the Strong, King of Poland and a Saxon elector, and a cousin to the sixth degree to the kings of France Louis XVI, Louis XVIII and Charles X. Sand's mother, Sophie-Victoire Delaborde, was a commoner. Sand was born in Paris but raised for much of her childhood by her grandmother, Marie Aurore de Saxe, Madame Dupin de Francueil, at her grandmother's estate, Nohant, in the French province of Berry . She later used the setting in many of her novels. It has been said that her upbringing was quite liberal. In 1822, at the age of nineteen, Sand married Baron Casimir Dudevant , illegitimate son of Baron Jean-François Dudevant. She and Dudevant had two children: Maurice and Solange .
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