Honoré de Balzac

Balzac failed at almost everything before he succeeded at the largest literary project of the nineteenth century. He trained for the law and abandoned it, then sank borrowed money into a printing house and a type foundry that collapsed and left him with debts he carried, and fled, for the rest of his life.

Out of that wreckage came the idea that made him. Around 1834 he began to see his separate novels as one connected structure: a single fictional France in which the same people recur, so that a minor lawyer in one book is the ruined protagonist of another. He called it La Comédie Humaine, and left roughly ninety finished works and more than two thousand named characters — bankers, servants, journalists, misers, provincial girls, police spies — assembled into what he intended as a complete natural history of his society.

He wrote at night, fuelled by enormous quantities of coffee, and rewrote so heavily on the printers' proofs that typesetters charged him extra. In March 1850, after eighteen years of correspondence and courtship, he married Ewelina Hańska. He died five months later, at fifty-one, the great structure still unfinished.