Authors

French · 1821–1880

Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert was a French novelist whose Madame Bovary (1857) — prosecuted for obscenity on publication and acquitted — is one of the founding texts of literary realism and the novel of provincial life. His prose style, developed through obsessive revision ('le mot juste'), influenced virtually every subsequent serious novelist. Sentimental Education (1869) and the unfinished Bouvard and Pécuchet show his increasing pessimism about human potential. He spent much of his career at his family estate in Normandy; his letters to George Sand and other correspondents are among the finest in French literature.