Honoré de Balzac

Balzac tried law, then publishing, then printing, each venture collapsing into debt that chased him the rest of his life. He wrote his way out of it at a punishing pace: up at midnight, sustained by what he claimed was fifty cups of coffee a day, producing the Comédie humaine's ninety-odd novels and stories in barely twenty years, often revising proofs so heavily his printers charged extra.

He courted a Polish countess, Ewelina Hańska, by letter for nearly two decades before finally marrying her in 1850. He died five months later in Paris, forty-eight hours after Victor Hugo came to see him, his body wrecked by the coffee, the debt, and the work itself.