Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), one of the greatest and most influential of novelists, was born in Tours and educated at the Collège Vendôme and the Sorbonne. He began his career as a pseudonymous writer of sensational potboilers before achieving success with a historical novel, The Chouans. Balzac then conceived his great work, The Human Comedy, an ongoing series of novels in which he set out to offer a complete picture of contemporary society and manners. Always working under an extraordinary burden of debt, Balzac wrote some eighty-five novels in the course of his last twenty years, including such masterpieces as Père Goriot, Eugénie Grandet, Lost Illusions, and Cousin Bette. In 1850, he married Eveline Hanska, a rich Polish woman with whom he had long conducted an intimate correspondence. Three months later he died. In addition to The Girl with the Golden Eyes, NYRB Classics publishes The Human Comedy: Selected Stories, The Lily in the Valley, The Memoirs of Two Young Wives, and The Unknown Masterpiece.

Carol Cosman translated numerous French books over a range of genres-fiction, biography, memoirs, history, and philosophy. In addition to her translation of short fiction by Balzac, her English version of Jean-Paul Sartre's three-thousand-page The Family Idiot is especially noteworthy.

Robert Alter is an emeritus professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He has written widely on the European novel, particularly Balzac and Flaubert, and is the author of a critical biography of Stendhal. He lives in Berkeley.