A blond giant of a man with green eyes and a resonant actor’s voice, Gustave Flaubert was perhaps the finest French writer of the nineteenth century. He lived quietly in the provinces with his widowed mother, composing his novels at the rate of five words an hour. He detested his respectable neighbors, and they, in turn, helped to ensure his infamy as a writer of immoral books. Geoffrey Wall’s stylish and compelling new biography weaves together Flaubert’s provincial life with his escapes to Paris, where he participated in all the important literary and social milieus, and his passionate travels put him in company with courtesans, actresses, acrobats, gypsies, and simpletons of every stripe. Wall is especially good at showing how Flaubert’s outwardly calm, inwardly turbulent life inspired the complex settings and unforgettable characters of his imperishable novels.