Honore de Balzac wrote ninety novels in twenty years, fueled by fifty cups of coffee a day and driven by debts so enormous that he spent his entire career outrunning creditors. His Human Comedy — an interconnected web of over two thousand characters mapping every level of French society — invented the realist novel and influenced every major novelist who followed, from Dickens to Proust to Dostoevsky.

This episode traces Balzac from his lonely childhood through the failed business ventures that buried him in debt, the superhuman writing schedule that produced a novel every few weeks, and the pursuit of a Polish countess that consumed his final years.

• Balzac's emotionally deprived childhood and the early literary failures that preceded his breakthrough
• The crushing debts from failed printing and publishing ventures that dr ...