Flaubert, Gustave
Flaubert, Gustave ( 1821 – 80 ),French novelist, one of the masters of 19th-cent. fiction, born in Rouen, the second son of a physician. His first published novel, Madame Bovary ( 1857 ), the story of the adulteries and suicide of a doctor's wife in provincial Normandy, is notable for its rigorous psychological development, and manifests the qualities that mark all of his mature work: authenticity of detail, an impersonal narrative method, a precise and harmonious style. Certain passages in Madame Bovary having been judged to be offensive to public morals, Flaubert , his publisher, and his printer were tried but acquitted. Ancient Carthage is minutely recreated in his next novel, Salammbô ( 1862 ), for which he undertook detailed researches. L'Éducation sentimentale ( 1869 ), Flaubert's ‘moral history of the men of my generation’, charts the progress and decline of the successive amours,...
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