The son of a doctor and an aristocrat, Gustave Flaubert grew up in Rouen, where he received a literature-rich private education. In 1840, he went to Paris to attend law school. There, he met Victor Hugo, decided to become a writer,...
[more]The son of a doctor and an aristocrat, Gustave Flaubert grew up in Rouen, where he received a literature-rich private education. In 1840, he went to Paris to attend law school. There, he met Victor Hugo, decided to become a writer, abandoned law, and, in 1846, began an affair with poet and novelist Louise Colet.
Flaubert's first novel, 'The Temptation of St. Anthony' (1849), was seen as too gratuitous by his close friends and its publication was delayed. He worked on 'Madame Bovary', his seminal work about a dissatisfied, fantasy-prone and unfaithful young wife, in the early 1850s, completing and publishing the novel in 1856. The novel's content caused Flaubert and his publisher to be the defendants in a morality law suit, but both were acquitted. Flaubert went onto publish 'Salammbo' (1862), an historical novel set in the 3rd Century BC, and 'Sentimental Education' (1869), about young man in love with an older woman. Flaubert, who had suffered from nervous illnesses much of his life, died in 1880 of cerebral hemorrhage. His final work, the satirical novel 'Bouvard et Pécuchet', was unfinished and published posthumously.
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a biography of Flaubert in 1971, and the novelist's correspondence with writers George Sand and Ivan Turgenev have been widely read.
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