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Victor Hugo (1802-1885) is one of the most well-regarded French writers of the nineteenth century. He was a poet, novelist and dramatist, and he is best remembered in English as the author of Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) (1831) and Les Miserables (1862). Hugo was born in Besancon, and became a pivotal figure of the Romantic movement in France, involved in both literature and politics. He founded the literary magazine Conservateur Litteraire in 1819, aged just seventeen, and turned his hand to writing political verse and drama after Louis-Philippe's accession to the throne in 1830. His literary output was curtailed following the death of his daughter in 1843, but he began a new novel as an outlet for his grief. Completed many years later, this novel became Hugo's most notable work, Les Miserables.
Hugo's genius was for the creation of simple and recognizable myth. The huge success of Les Miserables as a didactic work on behalf of the poor and oppressed is due to his poetic and myth-enlarged view of human nature. V. S. Pritchett It was Tolstoy who vindicated [Hugo's] early ambition by judging Les Miserables one of the world's great novels, if not the greatest [His] ability to present the extremes of experience 'as they are' is, in the end, Hugo's great gift. From the Introduction by Peter Washington
