quality:correction
Legacy

Balzac influenced writers of his time and beyond. He has been compared to Charles Dickens and is considered one of Dickens' significant influences. Literary critic W. H. Helm calls one "the French Dickens" and the other "the English Balzac", while another critic, Richard Lehan, states that "Balzac was the bridge between the comic realism of Dickens and the naturalism of Zola ".

Gustave Flaubert was also substantially influenced by Balzac. Praising his portrayal of society while attacking his prose style, Flaubert once wrote: "What a man he would have been had he known how to write!" While he disdained the label of "realist", Flaubert clearly took heed of Balzac's close attention to detail and unvarnished depictions of bourgeois life. This influence shows in Flaubert's work L'éducation sentimentale which owes a debt to Balzac's Illusions Perdues. "What Balzac started", observes Lehan, "Flaubert helped finish".

Marcel Proust similarly learned from the Realist example; he adored Balzac and studied his works carefully, although he criticised what he perceived as Balzac's "vulgarity". Balzac's story Une Heure de ma Vie (An Hour of my Life, 1822), in which minute details are followed by deep personal reflections, is a clear forebear of the style which Proust used in À la recherche du temps perdu. However, Proust wrote later in life that the contemporary fashion of ranking Balzac higher than Tolstoy was "madness".

Perhaps the author most affected by Balzac was American expatriate novelist Henry James. In 1878 James wrote with sadness about the lack of contemporary attention paid to Balzac, and lavished praise on him in four essays (in 1875, 1877, 1902, and 1913). In 1878 James wrote: "Large as Balzac is, he is all of one piece and he hangs perfectly together". He wrote with admiration of Balzac's attempt to portray in writing "a beast with a hundred claws". In his own novels James explored more of the psychological motives of the characters and less of the historical sweep exhibited by Balzac—a conscious style preference; he stated: "the artist of the Comédie Humaine is half smothered by the historian". Still, both authors used the form of the realist novel to probe the machinations of society and the myriad motives of human behavior.

William Saroyan wrote a short story about Balzac in his 1971 book, Letters from 74 rue Taitbout or Don't Go But If You Must Say Hello To Everybody.

Balzac's vision of a society in which class, money and personal ambition are the key players has been endorsed by critics of both left-wing and right-wing political persuasions. Marxist Friedrich Engels wrote: "I have learned more than from all the professional historians, economists and statisticians put together". Balzac has received high praise from critics as diverse as Walter Benjamin and Camille Paglia. He was also praised by James Baldwin, who said 1984: "I'm sure that my life in France would have been very different had I not met Balzac. the way that country and its society works." In 1970 Roland Barthes published S/Z, a detailed analysis of Balzac's story Sarrasine and a key work in structuralist literary criticism. Carlos Fuentes, sometimes called "the Balzac of Mexico", cited Balzac as a major influence on his writing.

Balzac has also influenced popular culture. Many of his works have been made into popular films and television serials, including: Travers Vale 's Père Goriot (1915), Les Chouans (1947), Le Père Goriot (1968 BBC mini-series), and La Cousine Bette (1974 BBC mini-series, starring Margaret Tyzack and Helen Mirren; 1998 film, starring Jessica Lange). Balzac is mentioned, along with Chaucer and Rabelais, to humorous effect (as authors of allegedly unreliable morals) in Meredith Willson 's musical The Music Man. He is included in François Truffaut 's 1959 film, The 400 Blows. Truffaut believed Balzac and Proust to be the greatest French writers.

His life was dramatised as the 1950 Australian radio play Balzac.