Honoré de Balzac (; 20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. His most famous work is "La Comédie humaine". It is a collection of novels and short stories and is about French life after 1815. La Peau de chagrin (1831), Eugénie Grandet (1833) and Le Père Goriot (1835) are some of the most famous works from this collection. His books influenced many other people such as Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe.