Balzac, the novelist who created an entire universe of hundreds of characters, changed the course of the novel and remains one of the most widely read classics today. Idolized by Baudelaire and the nineteenth-century bohemian circles, he was celebrated both as a champion of realism and a visionary. Balzac’s life itself reads like a novel: ambitious, tireless, and relentless, he sought glory, luxury, and recognition from society’s elite, working sixteen-hour days and confronting failures and a hostile literary system. This biography, written by a scholar who has devoted fifty years to studying Balzac, traces his extraordinary life in the context of the first great social and literary modernity, revealing a man who bore many traits of his own fictional heroes.