GRAHAM ROBBVictor HugoA Biography"Graham Robb tells the complicated story of this colossal life with authority and sympathy. . . . Unquestionably, a magnificent biography." — Washington Post Book WorldVictor Hugo was the most important writer of the nineteenth century in France: leader of the Romantic movement; revolutionary playwright; poet; epic novelist; author of the last universally accessible masterpieces in the European tradition, among them Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He was also a radical political thinker and eventual exile from France; a gifted painter and architect; a visionary who conversed with Virgil, Shakespeare, and Jesus Christ; in short, a tantalizing personality who dominated and maddened his contemporaries. Graham Robb has written an extraordinary biography that does full justice to the drama of his subject's life — a life that Robb calls "the most lucid case of madness in literature." By grasping the giant in his entirety, and in his many disguises, Robb rewards us with a panorama of French and European society from the Revolution to the dawn of the twentieth century. "This is a subtle book, full of wit and erudition. . . . [T]he best biography of Hugo in French or English." — Wall Street Journal "Lucidly written, persuasively opinionated, this enormously readable book stands as a model of what the modern biography can accomplish." — Philadelphia Inquirer
Graham Robb's previous book, Balzac: A Biography, was a New York Times Best Book of 1994. He lives in Oxford, England. |
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1999 / paperback / ISBN 0-393-31899-0 1997 / hardcover / ISBN 0-393-04578-1 16 pages of halftones / 720 pages / Biography | ||||||
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