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TODAY IN LITERARY HISTORY:

Birthday of Stendhal, 1783,
One of the most original and complex French writers of the first half of the 19th century.


Known for his acute analysis of his characters' psychology, he is considered one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of realism, as is evident in the novels Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black, 1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839).

Stendhal is considered one of the foremost and earliest practitioners of the realistic form. Prior to Stendhal, most novelists used a highly exaggerated rated and melodramatic Romantic style, which lent itself well to romances and Gothic horror, but was inadequate for depicting the contemporary and increasingly urban world.

Stendhal's writing style is realistic in the sense that offers a penetrating and almost scientific view of the thought processes of his characters, and his model would prove to be an exemplar for generations of novelists attempting to create verisimilitude in their writing. The great movement of Russian realism in the second half of the nineteenth century owes an immense debt to Stendhal.

And a “Fun Fact’ -- Throughout his life, Stendhal carefully concealed his identity, as a result of which he was known not as a fiction writer, but as the author of books on the historical and architectural monuments of Italy.

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