Who was Gustave Flaubert?

Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) was a French novelist and short-story writer. He is best known for his realist novel Madame Bovary (1856), which is considered a masterpiece of Western literature. Flaubert was a perfectionist and spent great care in crafting his sentences, often reworking them multiple times. He is considered one of the founders of modernism and his influence on subsequent writers is immeasurable.