I don't know if Rabelais counts as urban fantasy. (The labels for him that come to mind are "comic grotesque" and "satirist") When I was in high school I rea

I don't know if Rabelais counts as urban fantasy. (The labels for him that come to mind are "comic grotesque" and "satirist") When I was in high school I read "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" thinking it would be another classic fanciful monster tale like Dracula. It wasn't, but it did capture all the different strata of Paris society. (So more "urban" than "fantasy"). Victor Hugo was excellent at that. And of course Paris was the other city in Dickens' "Tale of Two Cities". (Whereas Alexandre Dumas books always felt more like a paperback page-turner...) I don't know how you'd feel about Francois Villon -- not a novelist, but a French criminal-poet. The night before he was sentenced to death, he wrote a poem giving away pieces of himself and his life. The next day his sentence was commuted. There's a great biography of his life by Wyndham Lewis.