HonorÉ De Balzac (1799-1850) is generally credited as the inventor of the modern realistic novel. In more than ninety novels, he set forth French society and life as he saw it. He created a cast of over two thousand individual and identifiable characters, some of whom reappear in different novels. He organized his works into his masterpiece,  La Comedie Humaine, which was the final result of his attempt to grasp the whole of society and experience into one varied but unified work.

Richard Howard was born in Cleveland in 1929. He is the author of fourteen volumes of poetry and has published more than one hundred fifty translations from the French, including works by Gide, Stendhal, de Beauvoir, Baudelaire, and de Gaulle. Howard received a National Book Award for his translation of  Fleurs du mal  and a Pulitzer Prize for  Untitled Subjects , a collection of poetry.