Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert was prosecuted in 1857 for offending public morality with the adultery depicted in Madame Bovary. He was acquitted, and the trial's publicity helped make the novel a bestseller and established Flaubert's literary reputation.

Flaubert was famous for his obsessive search for 'le mot juste'—the exactly right word—in every sentence he wrote. He would sometimes spend days on a single page, reading sentences aloud to test their rhythm and precision.

Flaubert also wrote Sentimental Education (1869), Salammbô (1862), and The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874). He left the unfinished comic novel Bouvard and Pécuchet at the time of his death in 1880.

Flaubert's rigorous prose style and objective narration profoundly influenced literary realism and modernism, shaping writers like Guy de Maupassant (his protégé), Émile Zola, and Henry James. His correspondence also became a major document of literary theory and craft.