Pere Goriot

by Balzac, Honore de; Brooks, Peter; Reed, Henry; Reed, Henry

• ISBN13: 9780451529596
• ISBN10: 0451529596
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-12-07
• Publisher: Signet Classics

Summary

A masterful study of a father whose sacrifices for his daughters have become a compulsion, this novel marks Balzac's "real entrée" into La Comédie Humaine, his series of almost one hundred novels and short stories meant to depict "the whole pell-mell of civilization."

Author Biography

The son of a civil servant, Honoré de Balzac was born in 1799 in Tours, France. After attending boarding school in Vendôme, he gravitated to Paris where he worked as a legal clerk and a hack writer, using various pseudonyms, often in collaboration with other writers. Balzac turned exclusively to fiction at the age of thirty and went on to write a large number of novels and short stories set amid turbulent nineteenth-century France. He entitled his collective works The Human Comedy. Along with Victor Hugo and Dumas père and fils, Balzac was one of the pillars of French romantic literature. He died in 1850, shortly after his marriage to the Polish countess Evelina Hanska, his lover of eighteen years.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. vii
Note On The Text	p. xix
Select Bibliography	p. xxi
A Family Boarding House	p. 1
Entry on the Social Scene	p. 83
Death-Dodger	p. 150
The Father's Death	p. 207
Explanatory Notes	p. 267
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.