Balzac: A Nineteenth-century Novelist with Lessons for America

About the Book

Called the founder of the modern novel, Balzac received encomiums from numerous critics and writers. Henry James called him “the greatest of all novelists.” Ideologically, Balzac championed the return in France of the pre-revolutionary rule of Church and Monarch, and in his novels, he assailed ever more aggressively the bankers who were seizing control of the government, the judiciary and the economy. This aspect of Balzac’s investigations in his Human Comedy of the trends in French customs and manners during the half-century following the 1789 Revolution is illuminating for Americans struggling to survive in the profound depression prrecipitated by the maneuverings and manipulations of multinational banks and investment firms. Providing a clear and monitory lesson to Americans desperately seeking relief in a Depression Balzac demonstrates that profiteering, legal and illegal; and a general atmosphere of greed and materialism are inherent in the free enterprise system and unsusceptible to superficial reforms.

About the Author

Impressed by Gyorgy LukÜs’s essays on the works of Balzac, Arthur Kahn turned to some of the French writer’s novels as models for his own 1954 Brownstone, a Novel of New York. He met LukÜs in Budapest in 1960 and again in 1963 and maintained a lively correspondence with him while translating several of LukÜs’s literary essays for a volume published in 1970 under the title Writer and Critic. In 2009, an 89 year old retired professor and the author of numerous books, Kahn completed the fifth volume of his autobiography (he had enjoyed a life of variegated experience). Although burdened by age and by a cardiac disorder, he undertook a project of homage both to Balzac and to the Hungarian philosopher and critic and completed the work just before his ninetieth birthday