Art historian’s dissection of famous work is as much about the painting as his decades-long obsession with it.

Long before William Faulkner connected multiple novels and stories via a fictional Mississippi county he called Yoknapatawpha, Honoré de Balzac churned out dozens of interlinked novels and stories to ...

BALZAC—Rene Benjamin—Knopf ($5). Fiction could be, has been defined as imaginary biography. Biography in its latest form could be defined as imaginary fiction. Into this definition fits the work ...

In our era of boxed-set, television bingeing, it’s astonishing there hasn’t been a revival of Honoré de Balzac’s “Human Comedy.” Did the conclusion of “The Wire” leave you bereft? Here’s a serial that ...

When a strange new social phenomenon develops, people frequently wonder, “What would Tom Wolfe make of this?” Fortunately we have just been given a very Wolfean take on a distressing aspect of ...

This is the sprawling saga of Honoré de Balzac, a man who created a great literary oeuvre from the dramas and adventures of his own life - a life that he shaped into one spectacular and unforgettable ...

The 19th-century novelist Honoré de Balzac was Catholic, French to the core and obsessed with the material details of French society. Yet there is something profoundly Hindu in the way he sought to ...

Honoré de Balzac drank coffee for days on end, weeks on end, on an empty stomach, and they say it's how he croaked. The 19th-century French writer "died of caffeine poisoning." Some say he drank 50 ...

No adequate biography of Honoré de Balzac has yet been written ; a fact somewhat strange, considering the interest and attractiveness of the subject and the abundance of the material available. Of ...

Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. He is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. Balzac's first project was a libretto for a comic opera called "Le ...