Stendhal

Marie-Henri Beyle took the pen name Stendhal from a small Prussian town and spent his youth chasing Napoleon's army across Europe, including the catastrophic 1812 retreat from Moscow. He later served as a French consul in provincial Italy, a comfortable exile from Paris that gave him time to write.

The Red and the Black (1830) followed a carpenter's ambitious, doomed climb through Restoration society; The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) he reportedly dictated in fifty-two days, all energy and speed. Both sold poorly in his lifetime (he complained of being understood by perhaps a hundred readers), and he predicted his real audience wouldn't arrive until around 1935. He died of a stroke on a Paris street in 1842, largely unmourned by the public that later canonized him.