Gustave Flaubert is a French writer born in Rouen on December 12, 1821 and died in Croisset, a place in the district of Canteleu, on May 8, 1880. Considered, with Victor Hugo, Stendhal, Balzac and Zola, as one of the greatest French novelists of the nineteenth century, Flaubert is distinguished by his conception of the writer's craft and by the modernity of his novelistic poetics. A leading prose writer of the second half of the nineteenth century, Gustave Flaubert left his mark on universal literature through the depth of his psychological analyses, his concern for realism, his lucid view of the behavior of individuals and society and the strength of his style in great novels, such as Madame Bovary (1857), Salammbô (1862), L'Éducation sentimentale (1869) and the collection of short stories Trois Contes (1877).