author
Léon Gozlan
1803–1866
A lively 19th-century French novelist, playwright, and journalist, he moved from a hard early life at sea into the bustling literary world of Paris. His work mixed sharp social observation with storytelling energy, and he was remembered as a friend and biographer of Honoré de Balzac.
4 Audiobooks
Les Tourelles: Histoire des châteaux de France, volume I
by Léon Gozlan
Les Tourelles: Histoire des châteaux de France, volume II
by Léon Gozlan
Le notaire de Chantilly
by Léon Gozlan
About the author
Born in Marseille in 1803, Léon Gozlan came from a Sephardic Jewish family whose fortunes declined during his youth. Before finishing his education, he went to sea and traveled widely, experiences that later fed the color and movement of his writing.
By the late 1820s he was in Paris, building a career in journalism and literature. He wrote novels, plays, criticism, and historical or picturesque prose, becoming one of the many active men of letters in 19th-century France. Modern readers are perhaps most likely to meet him through his place in the literary circle around Balzac, on whom he later wrote a biographical study.
Though he is less widely read today than some of his contemporaries, Gozlan's career shows the range of French literary life in his time: newspapers, theater, fiction, and lively cultural commentary all overlapping in one working writer's life. He died in 1866.