Salammbô

Biographie de Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) was a French novelist known especially for his debut novel Madame Bovary (1857). Born in Rouen to a middle-class family, he abandoned a law career in 1846 to write full-time. A scrupulous stylist, his total literary output was relatively small, and he was known for his painstaking labor. A proponent of le mot juste (the right word), he is considered the leading French exponent of literary realism and widely admired for his impeccable prose.
Vladimir Nabokov and Milan Kundera have placed Madame Bovary on the same artistic plane as poetry.