About the Author

Gustave Flaubert, a French writer who is counted among the greatest Western novelists. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary, and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style. Flaubert was a tireless worker and often complained in his letters to friends about the strenuous nature of his work. Flaubert scrupulously avoids the inexact, the abstract, the vaguely inapt expression which is the bane of ordinary methods of composition. Flaubert believed in, and pursued, the principle of finding le mot juste (the right word), which he considered as the key mean to achieve quality in literary art. He worked in sullen solitude, sometimes occupying a week in the completion of one page.