{"product_id":"book-171r","title":"Balzac: A Biography","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eHonoré de Balzac worked himself to death at fifty-one, producing ninety-plus novels documenting nineteenth-century French society. He earned enormous sums yet died deeply in debt. He observed human psychology with unprecedented accuracy yet was blind to his own delusions.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eStefan Zweig's Balzac, completed shortly before his 1942 suicide, examines this paradox: genius and disaster from the same obsessive energy. Balzac wrote at night, fueled by fifty cups of coffee daily, working twelve to sixteen hour stretches. Each novel paid debts; the income immediately went to creditors, requiring more writing. The cycle was fatal.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe biography follows interconnected themes: catastrophic business schemes, work habits that made him legendary and killed him, seventeen-year obsession with Polish countess Eveline Hanska (they married months before his death), and unprecedented ambition-La Comédie Humaine as systematic documentation of society through interconnected novels.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eZweig's method is literary and psychological rather than scholarly, synthesizing Balzac's correspondence into dramatic narrative. The portrait captures essential truths: novels emerged from the same energy producing financial chaos; the paradoxes-realist living in fantasy, money expert who was financially catastrophic-genuinely characterized his life.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWritten in Zweig's final years, the biography reflects on artistic achievement's costs. Balzac died believing himself a failure-in debt, health ruined. Posterity recognized him as literature's giant. Zweig, despairing about Europe's destruction, surely contemplated this gap between contemporary failure and eventual recognition.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eCompelling introduction to why Balzac matters and meditation on creativity's demands-the demon granting genius while destroying its host. Zweig's final major work: exploration of obsession from a master who understood its costs.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"INAudio","offers":[{"title":"Audiobook","offer_id":50773739634992,"sku":"BD171r","price":14.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0879\/2784\/9264\/files\/171r-Square-cover.jpg?v=1771670097","url":"https:\/\/downpour.com\/products\/book-171r","provider":"Downpour","version":"1.0","type":"link"}