Balzac's Lives

<b>Enter the mind of French literary giant Honoré de Balzac through a study of nine of his greatest characters and the novels they inhabit. <i>Balzac's Lives</i> illuminates the writer's life era and work in a completely original way.</b> <p/>Balzac more than anyone invented the nineteenth-century novel and Oscar Wilde went so far as to say that Balzac had invented the nineteenth century. But it was above all through the wonderful unforgettable extravagant characters that Balzac dreamed up and made flesh--entrepreneurs bankers inventors industrialists poets artists bohemians of both sexes journalists aristocrats politicians prostitutes--that he brought to life the dynamic forces of an era that ushered in our own. Peter Brooks's <i>Balzac's Lives</i> is a vivid and searching portrait of a great novelist as revealed through the fictional lives he imagined.