Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert was a nineteenth-century French novelist whose painstaking prose style made him a founder of literary realism.

His masterpiece *Madame Bovary* (1857), about a provincial doctor's wife destroyed by romantic illusions, provoked an obscenity trial and became a landmark of the novel form.

Flaubert's obsession with finding *le mot juste*—the exact right word—influenced generations of writers who treat sentences as objects to be sculpted.