Honor de Balzac (20 May 1799 - 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Com die humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon Bonaparte. 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 morally ambiguous. His writing influenced many subsequent novelists such as Marcel Proust, mile Zola, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, E a de Queir s, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gustave Flaubert, Benito P rez Gald s, 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. In this book: Father Goriot Translator: Ellen Marriage The Magic Skin Translator: Ellen Marriage Eugenie Grandet Translator: Katharine Prescott Wormeley Cousin Betty Translator: James Waring The girl with the golden eyes Translator: Ellen Marriage