Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), one of France's leading exponents of literary realism, was born in Rouen. He arrived in Paris in 1840 to study law but soon returned to his hometown, where he largely remained, focused on his writing in the family home in Croisset. Provincial life was the focus of Madame Bovary, but a trip to Egypt and the Middle East gave him inspiration for Salammbô. He died at the age of fifty-eight.
Raymond N. MacKenzie is professor of English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. He has translated Balzac's Lost Souls and Lost Illusions, d'Aurevilly's Diaboliques, and Stendhal's Italian Chronicles and Red and Black, all published by the University of Minnesota Press, as well as Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Zola's Germinal, a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize.
