HONORÉ DE BALZAC was born in 1799 in Tours, France, into a bourgeois family (he added the aristocratic “de” in adulthood). Soon after graduating from the Sorbonne, he quit practicing law and, impoverished in a Parisian garret, began his legendary habit of writing feverishly around the clock, fueled by dozens of cups of coffee. He quickly produced a series of increasingly successful novels. He also began a series of failed businesses—including a publishing house and a pineapple farm—that would leave him, despite increasing fame, in hair-raising and life-long debt; his house in Paris had a hidden exit to escape creditors. Balzac cemented his status as the father of realism with his 95-volume overview of French society, the stories, essays, and novels (including Pere Goriot, Eugénie Grandet, and Cousin Bette) he called La Comédie Humaine. In 1850 the famous man-about-town married a Polish countess with whom he’d conducted a romantic correspondence for 18 years, only to die three months later.

Charlotte Mandell has won the Modern Language Association Prize in translation. Among other titles she has translated for The Art of the Novella series are Marcel Proust's The Lemoine Affair, Guy de Maupassant's The Horla, and Gustave Flaubert’s A Simple Heart.