Madame Bovary

Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) was a French writer and playwright whose work elevated the possibilities of literature with his conjunction of the ideals of the Romantic movement with the directness of the Realists. While Flaubert's extraordinary talent as an unsurpassed stylist of language combined with his obsessive quest for le mot juste limited his literary output, his books had a profound impact on the novel as we know it. His best-known works are Sentimental Education (1845), his historic novel Salammbô, (1862) and his masterpiece Madame Bovary (1856), one of the greatest works in the canon of world literature.