Honore de Balzac wrote ninety novels and died of coffee. More precisely, of heart failure brought on by drinking fifty cups a day so that he could stay awake and write.
He was born in Tours in 1799, to a family of modest means and immense ambitions. He meant to become a great writer, took a pen name with the aristocratic particle "de," and set about building The Human Comedy — a cycle of novels that was to be a complete portrait of French society. As Napoleon had an army, Balzac had characters: he carried them from book to book, letting them age, grow rich, go bankrupt, love, betray.
Pere Goriot, Eugenie Grandet, Lost Illusions, The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans — in every novel Paris stands alive: its smells, its money, its careers, its lovers, its debts. Balzac himself was in debt all his life. He wrote to pay it off, sank into new debt, and wrote again.
In 1850 he at last married the Polish aristocrat Ewelina Hanska, whom he had loved for twenty years. Five months after the wedding he was dead, at fifty-one. Hugo said at the funeral: "All his books are one book."