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World Revolution 1917-1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International by C. L. R. James. London. 1937. Secker & Warburg. 429 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - A popular history of the rise and fall of the Communist International. First published in 1937, this was one of the few contemporary attempts to synthesize the experience of the revolutionary movement after World War I. 'This book is an introduction to and survey of the revolutionary Socialist movement since the War-the antecedents, foundation and development of the Third International-its collapse as a revolutionary force. The Bolshevik Party, and the Soviet Union which it controls, being the dominating factors in the Third International, are given extensive treatment. The ideas on which the book are based are the fundamental ideas of Marxism. Since 1923 they have been expounded chiefly by Trotsky and a small band of collaborators. Many who sneered or ignored for years are now uncomfortably aware that inside Russia there is something vaguely called 'Trotskyism,' which the Soviet authorities, despite the economic successes, discover in the very highest offices in the State and in increasingly wide circles of the population. At the same time in Western Europe, statesmen and publicists, frightened at the steady rise of the revolutionary wave, join with the Stalinist regime in Russia to condemn 'Trotskyism.' Mr. Winston Churchill, in the Evening Standard of October 16th, 1936, unleashes a fierce diatribe against the 'Trotskyists,' coupled with scarcely veiled approval of the Stalinists, i.e. of the Third  International. Governments and national statesmen do pot concern themselves with jesuitical differences between interpretations of Marx and Lenin. The whole future of civilization is involved. The present crisis in world affairs, the growth of Fascism, the Spanish revolution, the inevitable revolution in France, the role of Russia yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow, the constant ebb and flow of political parties and movements all over the world, these things must be seen, can only be understood at all, as part of the international revolutionary movement against Capitalism which entered a decisive stage in 1917 with the foundation of the first Workers' State and, two years later, the organisation of a revolutionary International. Ruhr invasion; the illness and death of Lenin and the quick victory of Stalin over Trotsky in 1923; Chang-Kai-Shek's northern expedition in 1926, the failure of the Shanghai Commune and the disastrous adventure of the Canton insurrection; the breakdown of the New Economic policy in 1928, the 'liquidation of the kulak,' and the capitulation without a blow of the powerful working-class movement of Germany before Hitler; the restoration of private property on the Russian countryside, the Popular Front in France, the murder of Zinoviev and Kamenev, the turning of guns by the Third International on the P.O.U.M. in Spain because it agitates for the Socialist revolution-all these major events of post-war history are one closely-connected whole. Seen in isolation they are a jumble. This book shows their inter-connection. How much the book owes to the writings of Trotsky, the text can only partially show. But even with that great debt, it could never have been written at all but for the material patiently collected and annotated in France, China, America, Germany and Russia. My task has been chiefly one of selection and co-ordination. Yet in so wide and complicated a survey, differences of opinion and emphasis are bound to arise. Therefore while the book owes so much to others as to justify the use of the term 'we,' the ultimate responsibility must remain my own.' - from the author's preface to the book.

World Revolution was also reissued by Humantities Press in 1993 with an introduction by Al Richardson.

Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901-19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen's Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissi?re, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine. In 1932, he moved to Nelson in Lancashire, England in the hope of furthering his literary career. There he worked for the Manchester Guardian and helped the cricketer Learie Constantine write his autobiography. In 1933, James moved to London. James had begun to campaign for the independence of the West Indies while in Trinidad, and his Life of Captain Cipriani and the pamphlet The Case for West-Indian Self Government were his first important published works, but now he became a leading champion of Pan-African agitation and the Chair of the International African Friends of Abyssinia, formed in 1935 in response to Fascist Italy's invasion of what is now Ethiopia. He then became a leading figure in the International African Service Bureau, led by his childhood friend George Padmore, to whom he later introduced Kwame Nkrumah. In Britain, he also became a leading Marxist theorist. He had joined the Labour Party, but in the midst of the Great Depression he became a Trotskyist. By 1934, James was a member of an entrist Trotskyist group inside the Independent Labour Party. In this period, amid his frantic political activity, James wrote a play about Toussaint L'Ouverture, which was staged in the West End in 1936 and starred Paul Robeson and Robert Adams. That same year saw the publication in London of James's only novel, Minty Alley, which he had brought with him in manuscript from Trinidad; it was the first novel to be published by a black Caribbean author in the UK. He also wrote what are perhaps his best-known works of non-fiction: World Revolution (1937), a history of the rise and fall of the Communist International, which was critically praised by Leon Trotsky, and The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938), a widely acclaimed history of the Haitian revolution, which would later be seen as a seminal text in the study of the African diaspora. In 1936, James and his Trotskyist Marxist Group left the Independent Labour Party to form an open party. In 1938, this new group took part in several mergers to form the Revolutionary Socialist League. The RSL was a highly factionalised organisation and when James was invited to tour the United States by the leadership of the Socialist Workers' Party, then the US section of the Fourth International, in order to facilitate its work among black workers, he was encouraged to leave by one such factional opponent, John Archer, in the hope of removing a rival. James moved to the USA in late 1938, and after a tour sponsored by the SWP stayed on for over twenty years. But by 1940 he had developed severe doubts about Trotsky's analysis of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers state and left the SWP along with Max Shachtman, who formed the Workers' Party. Within the WP he formed the Johnson-Forest Tendency with Raya Dunayevskaya (his pseudonym being Johnson and Dunayevskaya's Forest) and Grace Lee (later Grace Lee Boggs) in order to spread their views within the new party. While within the WP the views of the J-F tendency underwent considerable development and by the end of the Second World War they had definitively rejected Trotsky's theory of Russia as a degenerated workers state, instead analysing it as being state capitalist. This political evolution was shared by other Trotskyists of their generation, most notably Tony Cliff. Unlike Cliff, they were increasingly looking towards the autonomous movements of oppressed minorities, a theoretical development already visible in James' thought in his discussions with Leon Trotsky which took place in 1939. An interest in such autonomous struggles came to take centre stage for the tendency. After 1945 the WP saw the prospects for a revolutionary upsurge as receding. The J-F Tendency, by contrast, were more enthused by prospects for mass struggles and came to the conclusion that the SWP, which they considered more proletarian than the WP, thought similarly to themselves about such prospects. Therefore, after a short few months as an independent group when they published a great deal of material for a small group, the J-F tendency joined the SWP in 1947. James would still describe himself as a Leninist, despite his rejection of Lenin's conception of the vanguard role of the revolutionary party, and argue for socialists to support the emerging black nationalist movements. By 1949, he came to reject the idea of a vanguard party. This led his tendency to leave the Trotskyist movement and rename itself the Correspondence Publishing Committee. In 1955, nearly half the membership of Committee would leave under the leadership of Raya Dunayevskaya to form a separate tendency of Marxist-humanism and found the organization, News and Letters Committees. Whether Raya Dunayevskaya's faction constituted a majority or minority seems to be a matter of dispute. Historian Kent Worcester claims that Dunayevskaya's supporters formed a majority of the pre-split Correspondence Publishing Committee but Martin Glaberman has claimed in New Politics that the faction loyal to James had a majority. The Committee split again in 1962 as Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs, two key activists, left to pursue a more Third Worldist approach. The remaining Johnsonites, including leading member Martin Glaberman reconstituted themselves as Facing Reality, which James advised from Britain until the group dissolved, against James' advice, in 1970. James's writings were influential in the development of Autonomist Marxism as a current within Marxist thought, though he himself saw his life's work as developing the theory and practice of Leninism. In 1953, James was forced to leave the US under threat of deportation for having overstayed his visa by over ten years. In his attempt to remain in the USA, James wrote a study of Herman Melville, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, and had copies of the privately published work sent to every member of the Senate. He wrote the book while being detained on Ellis Island. He returned back to England and then, in 1958 returned to Trinidad, where he edited The Nation newspaper for the pro-independence People's National Movement (PNM) party. He also had become involved again in the Pan-African movement, believing that the Ghana revolution showed that decolonisation was the most important inspiration for international revolutionaries. James also advocated the West Indies Federation, and it was over this that he fell out with the PNM leadership. He returned to Britain, then to the USA in 1968, where he taught at the University of the District of Columbia. Ultimately, he returned to Britain and spent his last years in Brixton, London. In the 1970s and 1980s, a number of books by James were republished or reissued by Allison and Busby, including four volumes of selected writings: The Future In the Present, Spheres of Existence, At the Rendezvous of Victory and Cricket. In 1983, a short British film featuring James in dialogue with the famous historian E. P. Thompson was made. A public library in Hackney, London is named in his honor; in 2005 a reception there to mark its 20th anniversary was attended by his widow, Selma James. C. L. R. James is widely known as a writer on cricket, especially for his autobiographical 1963 book, Beyond a Boundary. This is considered a seminal work of cricket writing, and is often named as the best single book on cricket (or even the best book on any sport) ever written. The book's key question, which is frequently quoted by modern journalists and essayists, is inspired by Rudyard Kipling and asks: What do they know of cricket who only cricket know? James uses this challenge as the basis for describing cricket in an historical and social context, the strong influence cricket had on his life, and how it meshed with his role in politics and his understanding of issues of class and race. The literary quality of the writing attracts cricketers of all political views. While editor of The Nation, he led the successful campaign in 1960 to have Frank Worrell appointed as the first black captain of the West Indies cricket team.

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The Last Days of Mankind by Karl Kraus. New Haven. 2015. Yale University Press. 9780300207675. Translated from the German by Fred Bridgham and Edward Timms. A Margellos World Republic of Letters Book. 649 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration: Austrian General Staff planning military strategy (cartoon by Fritz Schonpflug, c.1912).

  
DESCRIPTION - One hundred years after Austrian satirist Karl Kraus began writing his dramatic masterpiece, The Last Days of Mankind remains as powerfully relevant as the day it was first published. Kraus's play enacts the tragic trajectory of the First World War, when mankind raced toward self-destruction by methods of modern warfare while extolling the glory and ignoring the horror of an allegedly ‘defensive' war. This volume is the first to present a complete English translation of Kraus's towering work, filling a major gap in the availability of Viennese literature from the era of the War to End All Wars. Bertolt Brecht hailed The Last Days as the masterpiece of Viennese modernism. In the apocalyptic drama Kraus constructs a textual collage, blending actual quotations from the Austrian army's call to arms, people's responses, political speeches, newspaper editorials, and a range of other sources. Seasoning the drama with comic invention and satirical verse, Kraus reveals how bungled diplomacy, greedy profiteers, Big Business complicity, gullible newsreaders, and, above all, the sloganizing of the press brought down the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the dramatization of sensationalized news reports, inurement to atrocities, and openness to war as remedy, today's readers will hear the echo of the fateful voices Kraus recorded as his homeland descended into self-destruction.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Karl Kraus (1874-1936) was the editor of and chief contributor to the journal Die Fackel, the author of dramatic works including The Last Days of Mankind, and a translator of many foreign masterpieces into German. Jonathan McVity holds a bachelor's degree in English from Oxford University.

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My Life With Mario Vargas Llosa  by Julia Urquidi Illanes. New York. 1988. Peter Lang. 0820406899. Translated from the Spanish by C. R. Perricone. Series XXII Latin American Studies Vol.1. 264 pages. hardcover.

  
DESCRIPTION - Living in a Paris garret with a struggling young writer who has since become a famous author was not fictional for Julia Urquidi Illanes when she married Mario Vargas Llosa. This English translation is an incredible but true 'portrait of an artist as a young man' and of his aunt by marriage, whom he later fictionalized in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. Married for 9 years, Julia typed the first of his best-selling novels, The Time of the Hero, only to be abandoned when Mario fell in love with his first cousin Patricia, who is now his second wife. Readers will find this behind the scene account of a writer nominated for the Nobel prize gives insights into the creative processes of a novelist as it relates the range of human emotions in real life.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Julia Urquidi Illanes (30 May 1926 - 10 March 2010) was a Bolivian writer. Urquidi was born in Cochabamba. She was famous as the first wife of Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa (1955-1964) and also the namesake of one of his most famous novels, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. In 1983 she published her memories titled Lo que Varguitas no dijo (English: What Varguitas did not say). She died in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, aged 83.The English translator Catherine R. Perricone is Professor of Foreign Languages at Auburn University specializing in current Spanish American literature. She edited Alma y Corazon (Heart and Soul) an anthology of Latin American poetesses, and has published articles on Vargas Llosa and other novelists, an extensive bibliography on feminist criticism and Spanish American poetesses, and other subjects in Hispanic literature which have appeared in such journals as Hispania, Foreign Language Annals, Circulo, USF Language Quarterly, and The Americas Review.

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Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was by Angelica Gorodischer. Northampton. 2003. Small Beer Press. 1931520054. Translated from the Spanish by Ursula K. Le Guin. 248 pages. paperback  Cover painting by Rafal Olbinski.

  
DESCRIPTION - Ursula K. Le Guin chose to translate this novel which was on the New York Times Summer Reading list and winner of the Prix Imaginales, Más Allá, Poblet and Sigfrido Radaelli awards. This is the first of Argentinean writer Angélica Gorodischer's award-winning books to be translated into English. In eleven chapters, Kalpa Imperial's multiple storytellers relate the story of a fabled nameless empire which has risen and fallen innumerable times. Fairy tales, oral histories and political commentaries are all woven tapestry-style into Kalpa Imperial: beggars become emperors, democracies become dictatorships, and history becomes legends and stories. But this is much more than a simple political allegory or fable. It is also a celebration of the power of storytelling. Gorodischer and translator Ursula K. Le Guin are a well-matched, sly and delightful team of magician-storytellers. Rarely have author and translator been such an effortless pairing. Kalpa Imperial is a powerful introduction to the writing of Angélica Gorodischer, a novel which will enthrall readers already familiar with the worlds of Le Guin.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Angélica Gorodischer (1928-2022) was born in Buenos Aires and lived in Rosario from 1936 on. She published many novels and short story collections including Kalpa Imperial, Mango Juice, and Trafalgar, as well as a memoir, History of My Mother. Her work has been translated into many languages and her translators include Ursula K. Le Guin and Alberto Manguel. With certain self-satisfaction she claimed to never have written plays or poems, not even at 16 when everybody writes poems, especially on unrequited love. She received two Fulbright awards as well as many literary awards around the world, including the Life Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Awards and a 2014 Konex Special Mention Award.

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The Good Soldier Schweik by Jaroslav Hasek. Garden City. 1930. Doubleday Doran. Illustrated by Joseph Lada. Translated from the Czech by Paul Selver. 448 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - Poor Schweik. How simple-minded he is. Possibly even a lunatic. For how else could.he fail to recognize the matchless wisdom of his sergeant, his lieutenant, his colonel, and even his king, who all agree it is his noble duty to serve as a solid target for an enemy bullet. Can the author be so bold as to suggest that this miserable nobody, this disgraceful malingerer, this grain of sand in the great military machine, is the true hero of our times?. . . In all of the literature of war there is no more deadly weapon than Schweik’s blank gaze as he listens to a vital order, then marches resolutely away in the wrong direction. For in Schweik’s vision of the world -a world in which it is good to live and bad to die- lies a force that can topple empires and reduce the inspiring spectacle of war to bloody absurdity. The brilliant satire of this masterpiece does more than delight the reader; it casts the healing light of sanity upon the festering wounds of this war-torn century. ‘The reader is reminded of Swift, Gogol, Dickens. . . . Hasek makes our present-day beatniks, bohemians, and would-be satirists seem very small beer by comparison.’ -LONDON TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT.  (original title: Osudy Dobreho Vojaka Svejka Za Svetove Valky).  

Other editions:

The Good Soldier Svejk and His Fortunes in the World War by Jaroslav Hasek. New York. 1974. Penguin Books. 752 pages. paperback. 0140182748. Cover illustration by Josef Lada. Original Illustrations by Josef Lada. Translated from the Czech & With An Introduction by Cecil Parrott.

Hasek, Jaroslav. The Good Soldier Schweik. New York. 1963. Signet/New American Library. Translated From The Czech By Paul Selver. Illustrations By Josef Lada. Foreword By Leslie A. Fiedler. 429 pages. paperback. CT176. Cover: James Hill.

Jaroslav Hašek (April 30, 1883 – January 3, 1923) was a Czech humorist, satirist, writer and anarchist best known for his novel The Good Soldier Švejk, an unfinished collection of farcical incidents about a soldier in World War I and a satire on the ineptitude of authority figures, which has been translated into sixty languages. He also wrote some 1,500 short stories. He was a journalist, bohemian, and practical joker. Hašek was born in Prague, Bohemia (then within Austria-Hungary, now part of the Czech Republic), the son of high-school math teacher Josef Hašek and his wife Katerina. Poverty forced the family, with three children - another son Bohuslav, three years Hašek's younger, and an orphan cousin Maria - to move often, more than fifteen times during his infancy. He never knew a real home, and this rootlessness clearly influenced his life of wanderlust. When he was thirteen, Hašek's father died from excessive alcohol intake, and his mother was unable to raise him firmly. The teenage boy dropped out of high school at the age of 15 to become a druggist, but eventually graduated from business school. He worked briefly as a bank clerk in 1903, before embarking a career as a freelance writer and journalist. At the end of 1910/early 1911 he was also a dog salesman (a profession he was to attribute to his hero Švejk and from which some of the improbable anecdotes told by Švejk are drawn). In 1906 he joined the anarchist movement, having taken part in the 1897 anti-German riots in Prague as a schoolboy. He gave regular lectures to groups of proletarian workers and, in 1907, became the editor of the anarchist journal Komuna. As an anarchist in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his movements were closely monitored by the police and he was arrested and imprisoned on a regular basis; his offenses include numerous cases of vandalism and at least one case of assaulting a police officer, for which he spent a month in prison. He satirized the lengths to which the Austro-Hungarian police would go to entrap suspected political subversives in the opening chapters of The Good Soldier Švejk. Hašek met Jarmila Mayerová in 1907, and fell in love with her. However, due to his bohemian lifestyle, her parents found him an unsuitable match for their daughter. In response to this, Hašek attempted to back away from his radical politics and get a settled job as a writer. When he was arrested for desecrating a flag in Prague, Mayerová's parents took her into the country, in hope that this would end their relationship. This move was unsuccessful in that it failed to end the affair, but it did result in Hašek renewing his focus on writing. In 1909 he had sixty-four short stories published, over twice as many as in any previous year, and he was also named as the editor of the journal The Animal World. This job did not last long, however, as he was soon dismissed for publishing articles about imaginary animals which he had dreamed up (though this furnished further material for Švejk). On May 23 1910, he married Jarmila Mayerová. The marriage proved an unhappy one and lasted little more than a year. Mayerová went back to live with her parents in 1911 after he was caught trying to fake his own death. At the outbreak of World War I, Hašek lived periodically with cartoonist Josef Lada, who later illustrated the Good Soldier Švejk. Eventually he was drafted and joined the army; some of the characters in Švejk are based on people he met during the war. He did not spend long fighting in the front line, being captured by the Russians on September 24 1915. At the camp in Totskoye he contracted typhus but later on had a more comfortable existence. In June 1916 he was recruited as a volunteer to join the Czechoslovak Brigade, a unit of mainly Czech volunteers that were fighting the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This unit was later to become known as the Czechoslovak Legions. There he acted respectively as a clerk, journalist, soldier and recruitment agent until February 1918. In March 1918 the Czechoslovak Legions embarked on a journey to join the Western Front via Vladivostok. Hašek disagreed with this move and opted to leave the legion in favour of Czech and Russian revolutionaries. From October 1918 he joined the Red Army, mainly working as a recruiter and propaganda writer. In 1920 he remarried (although still married to Jarmila). He eventually returned to Prague in December 1920. However, in some circles he was not a popular figure, being branded a traitor and a bigamist, and struggled to find a publisher for his works. Before the war, in 1912, he had published the book The Good Soldier Švejk and other strange stories (Dobrý voják Švejk a jiné podivné historky) where the figure of Švejk appeared for the first time; but it was only after the war in his famous novel that Švejk became a sancta simplicitas, a cheerful idiot who joked about the war as if it were a tavern brawl. By this time, Hašek had become gravely ill and dangerously overweight. He no longer wrote, but dictated the chapters of Švejk from his bedroom in the village of Lipnice, where he died in on January 3 1923 of heart failure.

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Diderot: A Critical Biography by P. N. Furbank. New York. 1992. Knopf. 0679414215. 528 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - Denis Diderot (1713-84) was one of the most dazzling and attractive figures of the French Enlightenment. Known principally as the chief editor of the Encyclopedie, the great 'bible' of the age, he was an incomparable polymath - a dramatist, novelist, speculative philosopher, the founder of modern art criticism, and tireless correspondent. And his works, all of them informed by an uncannily modern sensibility, have influenced a staggering range of writers - from Goethe and Schiller to Balzac, Stendhal, Heine, Marx, Freud, and Kafka. In this masterful biography, P. N. Furbank provides a probing yet sympathetic account of Diderot's life and a brilliant analysis of his work, drawing intriguing connections between many previously disjointed notions about the man and his achievement. The son of a cutler (though a hopeless craftsman himself), Denis Diderot rose, after an interestingly complicated youth, to become an intimate of all the eminent intellectuals of the Enlightenment. A close friend of Rousseau, Grimm, and d'Alembert, and a familiar figure in the literary salons of Paris, he also met and corresponded with David Hume, David Garrick, and Laurence Sterne. The support of yet one more remarkable acquaintance, Catherine the Great, led to what is perhaps the most amazing episode in this astonishing life; at the age of sixty, he traveled to St. Petersburg and, in debate with the Empress, drew up plans for the conversion of Russia into an ideal republic. A deeply subversive genius, Diderot spent much of his working life under the threat of exile. Consequently his daring and inventive novels did not begin to reach the public until a decade after his death, and in the case of his inexhaustibly strange masterpiece, Rameau's Nephew, not until two decades or more. These and others of his most original compositions (also unpublished in his life) reveal aspects of Diderot virtually unknown to his contemporaries and often misunderstood today. Furbank's absorbing book meticu 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Philip Nicholas Furbank  (23 May 1920 - 27 June 2014) was an English writer, scholar and critic, and a professor (later emeritus) of the Open University. He was known for significant biographies, including E. M. Forster: A Life (1977/8), and Diderot: A Critical Biography (1992), which won a Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. He has also edited the works of Daniel Defoe and made major contributions to the question of attributions to Defoe in A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe, The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe, and A Political Biography of Daniel Defoe all co-written with W. R. Owens, in addition to many others on aspects of Defoe. He was a friend of Alan Turing, becoming his Executor, and general editor of Turing's collected works. He was also known as a reviewer. Furbank's other books include ones on the poet Mallarme and the painter Poussin, Italo Svevo: The Man and the Writer (1966) and Behalf (1999) on political thought.

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Selected Writings by Denis Diderot. New York. 1938. International Publishers. Translated from the French by Jean Stewart and Jonathan Kemp. 358 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - The present volume fulfills a long-felt need for an adequate English Translation of Diderot's sparkling dialogues, and other writings dealing particularly with his philosophy of natural science. Editor of the Encyclopédie and one of the leading thinkers who helped to prepare the way for the Great French Revolution, Diderot was also one of the most important materialist philosophers before Marx. A study of his writings is therefore important for an understanding of dialectical materialism; and the selections from his works included in this volume have been made with this purpose in mind. The genuinely progressive role of Diderot was stressed by the founders of scientific socialism. Engels wrote of him: ‘If ever anybody dedicated his whole life to the 'enthusiasm for truth and justice’ - using this phrase in the good sense - it was Diderot.’

Denis Diderot (October 5, 1713 – July 31, 1784) was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer, born at Langres in eastern France, the son of a master-cutler. He was originally destined for the Church, but rebelled and persuaded his father to allow him to complete his education in Paris. For most of his twenties and early thirties, Diderot remained nominally a law student, but in fact led a rather precarious and Bohemian existence. He read extensively during this period, and this is reflected in his early works such as the Pensées philosophiques (1746) and the Lettre sur les aveugles (1749) which show a keen interest in contemporary philosophical issues. During the early 1740s Diderot met three contemporaries of great future significance for himself and for the age: d’Alembert, Condillac and J. J. Rousseau. In 1747 Diderot embarked on the most important task of his life, the editorship of the Encyclopédie, whose publication he oversaw until its completion in 1773. Diderot’s boldest philosophical and scientific speculations are brilliantly summarized in a trilogy of dialogues collectively known as Le Réve de d’Alembert (1769). With Le Neveu de Rameau, begun in 1761, and Jacques le Fataliste, written between approximately 1755 and 1784, Diderot produced his greatest works of prose fiction, works which are highly original and daring, both in their form and in their content. Towards the end of his life, by now one of the most famous French writers, Diderot visited Saint Petersburg at the invitation of one of his most powerful admirers, the empress Catherine the Great, to whom he had promised his extensive library in return for her financial assistance. He died in 1784.

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Rameau's Nephew and D'Alembert's Dream by Denis Diderot. Baltimore. 1966. Penguin Books.  Translated from the French & With An Introduction by Leonard Tancock. 237 pages. paperback. L173. The cover shows Louis Carrogis Carmontelle's portrait of Rameau.  

DESCRIPTION - Diderot (1713-1784), tireless editor of the Encyclopedie, was one of the most advanced thinkers of the age before the French Revolution. His many literary works are evidence of a curious and eccentric genius, and RAMEAU'S NEPHEW is not the least remarkable of them. In this dramatized conversation, which swings from the sublime to the ridiculous and is constantly interrupted by the nephew's antics, Diderot openly challenges the moral principles of the day. The dialogue form is retained in D'ALEMBERT'S DREAM, in which he attacks stale conventions and threshes out a strange up-to-date view of life, sex, and morals.

Denis Diderot (October 5, 1713 – July 31, 1784) was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer, born at Langres in eastern France, the son of a master-cutler. He was originally destined for the Church, but rebelled and persuaded his father to allow him to complete his education in Paris. For most of his twenties and early thirties, Diderot remained nominally a law student, but in fact led a rather precarious and Bohemian existence. He read extensively during this period, and this is reflected in his early works such as the Pensées philosophiques (1746) and the Lettre sur les aveugles (1749) which show a keen interest in contemporary philosophical issues. During the early 1740s Diderot met three contemporaries of great future significance for himself and for the age: d’Alembert, Condillac and J. J. Rousseau. In 1747 Diderot embarked on the most important task of his life, the editorship of the Encyclopédie, whose publication he oversaw until its completion in 1773. Diderot’s boldest philosophical and scientific speculations are brilliantly summarized in a trilogy of dialogues collectively known as Le Réve de d’Alembert (1769). With Le Neveu de Rameau, begun in 1761, and Jacques le Fataliste, written between approximately 1755 and 1784, Diderot produced his greatest works of prose fiction, works which are highly original and daring, both in their form and in their content. Towards the end of his life, by now one of the most famous French writers, Diderot visited Saint Petersburg at the invitation of one of his most powerful admirers, the empress Catherine the Great, to whom he had promised his extensive library in return for her financial assistance. He died in 1784.

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Diderot's Selected Writings by Denis Diderot. New York. 1966. Macmillan. Translated from the French by Derek Coltman. Edited by Lester G. Crocker. 331 pages. hardcover. Jacket engraving courtesy of the Bettman Archive. Jacket design/Kenneth R. Deardoff.  

DESCRIPTION - This is the most complete selection in English of the witty, profound, and incendiary philosophe whose skeptical mind surveyed the whole range of human concerns, from metaphysics to sex, with elegance and bite. Diderot's writings were and have ever been a prime source for the Age of Reason. His twenty-eight volume Encyclopedia, which both preceded and prepared for the French Revolution, ranks as the greatest single work of the French Enlightenment. The twenty-six selections included here center on his achievements as a thinker - the PENSIES PHILOSOPHIQUES, LETTER ON THE BLIND, LETTER ON THE DEAF AND DUMB, NATURAL RIGHT, ON THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE, D' ALEMBERT'S DREAM, and others. They also cover his literary productions, including his masterpiece RAMEAU'S NEPHEW and his risque INDISCREET JEWELS, as well as his penetrating criticism of the art and artists of his time - the ESSAY ON PAINTING, and his estimates in the Salons of Chardin, Greuze, Boucher, and others. ‘A transcendent genius which had no equal in his age,' Jean Jacques Rousseau said of Diderot. Presented in totally new translation, this fine edition makes the central work finally available en gros to the English reader.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Denis Diderot (October 5, 1713 - July 31, 1784) was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer. He was a prominent person during the Enlightenment and is best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor, and contributor to the Encyclopedie along with Jean le Rond d'Alembert. Diderot also contributed to literature, notably with Jacques le fataliste et son maître (Jacques the Fatalist and his Master), which emulated Laurence Sterne in challenging conventions regarding novels and their structure and content, while also examining philosophical ideas about free will. Diderot is also known as the author of the dialogue, Le Neveu de Rameau (Rameau's Nephew), upon which many articles and sermons about consumer desire have been based. Lester G. Crocker, Distinguished Professor of Romance Languages and dean of the graduate school of Western Reserve University in Cleveland, has selected, edited, and provided an introduction and notes to this volume. Formerly professor and chairman of the department of modern languages at Goucher, his books include LA CORRESPONDANCE DE DIDEROT; TWO DIDEROT STUDIES, ETHICS AND ESTHETICS; AN AGE OF CRISIS, MAN AND WORLD IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY THOUGHT; and NATURE AND CULTURE, ETHICAL THOUGHT IN THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT. A revised edition of his biography of Diderot, THE EMBATTLED PHILOSOPHER, is published by The Free Press division of The Macmillan Company.

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This Is Not a Story and Other Stories by Denis Diderot. Columbia. 1992. University of Missouri Press. 0826208150. Translated from the French by P. N. Furbank. 166 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration - Bust of Denis Diderot by John Baptisdte Pigalle, 1777, Musee du Louvre, Prias. Photograph courtesy Lauros-Giraudon.

DESCRIPTION - The world is not short of admirers of Denis Diderot as a novelist, as well as a philosopher and encyclopedist. Yet several of his five short stories, which are all in their own way remarkable, are now virtually unknown. This has not always been so. Balzac called Diderot's ‘This Is Not a Story' ‘one of the grandest fragments of the history of the human heart'; he said ‘it sweated truth in every sentence.' Diderot's ‘The Two Friends from Bourbonne' helped to set Schiller on a new path as a writer. For the First time, P. N. Furbank has assembled and translated into English all five of Diderot's short stories, one or two of which have never been translated before, so that modern readers may finally appreciate this very original and important part of his oeuvre. The first three stories in the collection, ‘This Is Not a Story,' ‘On the Inconsis- tency of Public Opinion Regarding Our Private Actions,' and the well-known ‘Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage,' form a connected trilogy. As such, they profoundly address issues of cultural and ethical relativity and the mechanism of prejudice in the field of sexual ethics. ‘Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage,' though known as a philosophical polemic, acquires even more significance when read as the conclusion of the fictional trilogy. The fourth story, ‘The Two Friends from Bourbonne,' was originally published with Salomon Gessner's Idylls. It had great impact on the German writers of the Sturm and Drang,such as Goethe and Schiller, and served as a prototype for the ‘outlaw' figure celebrated by Schiller. The final story in this collection, ‘Conversation of a Father with His Children: or, the Danger of Setting Oneself above the Law,' is an autobiographical fantasy with philosophical intent. Diderot charmingly evokes an imaginary evening, and a discussion on ethics, in his paternal household. Those interested in the Enlightenment or fond of the works of Diderot will welcome this valuable contribution to the Diderot material available in English.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Denis Diderot (October 5, 1713 - July 31, 1784) was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer. He was a prominent person during the Enlightenment and is best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor, and contributor to the Encyclopedie along with Jean le Rond d'Alembert. Diderot also contributed to literature, notably with Jacques le fataliste et son maître (Jacques the Fatalist and his Master), which emulated Laurence Sterne in challenging conventions regarding novels and their structure and content, while also examining philosophical ideas about free will. Diderot is also known as the author of the dialogue, Le Neveu de Rameau (Rameau's Nephew), upon which many articles and sermons about consumer desire have been based.

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