He was born in 1799 –1850 a French novelist and playwright. His masterpiece was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled, The Human Comedy, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon.

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 complex, morally ambiguous and fully human.

His writing influenced many subsequent novelists such as Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gustave Flaubert, and Henry James 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.

An enthusiastic reader and independent thinker as a child, Balzac had trouble adapting to the teaching style of his grammar school. His willful nature caused trouble throughout his life and frustrated his ambitions to succeed in the world of business.

Before and during his career as a writer, he attempted to be a publisher, printer, businessman, critic, and politician; he failed in all of these efforts. The human comedy reflects his real-life difficulties, and includes scenes from his own experience.

It is the general attempt to depict subjects as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation and "in accordance with secular, empirical rules. In its most specific sense, Realism was an artistic movement that began in France in the 1850s, after the 1848 Revolution.

These Realists positioned themselves against Romanticism, a genre dominating French literature and artwork in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Seeking to be undistorted by personal bias.

Realism believed in the ideology of objective reality and revolted against the exaggerated emotionalism of the Romantic movement.

Truth and accuracy became the goals of many Realists. Many paintings depicted people at work, underscoring the changes wrought by the Industrial and Commercial Revolutions. The popularity of such 'realistic' works grew with the introduction of photography — a new visual source that created a desire for people to produce representations which look “objectively real.”

The faithful representation of reality, was based on the dogma of "objective reality", and was focused on showing everyday, quotidian activities and life, primarily among the middle or lower class society, without romantic idealization or dramatization.

Balzac's extensive use of detail, especially the detail of objects, to illustrate the lives of his characters made him an early pioneer of literary realism.

Balzac sought to present his characters as real people, neither fully good nor fully evil, but fully human to arrive at the truth the characters represent a particular range of social types: the noble soldier, the scoundrel, the proud workman, the fearless spy, the alluring mistress. he was able to balance the strength of the individual against the representation of the type which is an evidence of his skill.

The characters in his novels are struggling against the currents of human nature and society, they may lose more often than they win—but only rarely do they give up.

Representations of the city, countryside, and building interiors are essential to Balzac's realism, often serving to paint a naturalistic backdrop before which the characters' lives follow a particular course; this gave him a reputation as an early naturalist.

Complex details about locations sometimes stretch for fifteen or twenty pages. As he did with the people around him, Balzac studied these places in depth, traveling to remote locations and surveying notes that he had made on previous visits.

Five months after his wedding, Balzac died. Balzac was buried in Paris. "Today", said Hugo at the ceremony, "we have a people in black because of the death of the man of talent; a nation in mourning for a man of genius” . Later, Balzac became the subject of a monumental statue by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin, which stands near the intersection of Boulevard Montparnasse.