Pere Goriot

by Honore de Balzac

Overview

Edith Wharton's "Madame de Treymes" is a remarkable example of the form. It is the story of the tactical defeat but moral victory of an honest and upstanding American in his struggle to win a wife from a tightly united but feudally minded French aristocratic family. He loses, but they cheat. . . . In a masterpiece of brevity, Wharton dramatizes the contrast between the two opposing forces: the simple and proper old brownstone New York, low in style but high in principle, and the achingly beautiful but decadent Saint-Germain district of Paris. The issue is seamlessly joined.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781625584892
Publisher:	Start Publishing LLC
Publication date:	12/17/2012
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	229
Sales rank:	328,851
File size:	379 KB

About the Author

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) worked for three years in a lawyer’s office, preparing to practice law, but in 1819, he devoted himself to writing. His early stories were hackwork published under various pseudonyms. In 1829, he published La Dernier Chouan, the first story to bear his name and his first success. Over the next twenty years, Balzac’s literary output was prodigious: three or four novels a year, sometimes more. All became part of La Comédie Humaine, a panorama of the whole of French society, some of the most important works of this series being Eugénie Grandet (1833) and Père Goriot (1834). He also wrote plays and the popular Droll Stories (1833).
 
Henry Reed (1914-86) was a noted poet, translator, and writer of radio plays. In addition to Père Goriot, his translations include Eugénie Grandet by Honoré de Balzac. His poems were published in two volumes, A Map of Verona and Lessons of the War.
 
Peter Brooks is the author of a number of books, including Reading for the Plot, The Melodramatic Imagination, and Henry James Goes to Paris. He was a longtime professor of comparative literature and French at Yale University and University Professor at the University of Virginia.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“The greatest novelist who ever lived.”—W. Somerset Maugham
 
“A man of genius.”—Victor Hugo

Editorial Reviews

The greatest novelist who ever lived.”—W. Somerset Maugham
 
“A man of genius.”—Victor Hugo

From the Publisher