The portable Voltaire
Voltaire, Ben Ray Redman (Editor)
François-Marie Arouet, who later took the name of Voltaire, was the son of a notary. His father wanted him to study the law, but he was determined on a literary career. He gained an introduction to the intellectual life of Paris, and soon won a reputation as a writer of satires and odes--but the suspicion of having written a satire on the Regent procured him six months' imprisonment in the Bastille. His first tragedy, Oedipe (1718) met with great success, and soon after, he published the poem he had written in prison, a national epic, La Henriade (1724), which placed him with Homer and Virgil in the eyes of his contemporaries. After a second term in the Bastille, Voltaire spent three years (1726-1729) in England, and returned to France full of enthusiasm for the intellectual activity and the more tolerant form of government he had found there. His enthusiasm and his indictment of the French system of government are expressed in his Letters on England (1733), whose sale was forbidden in France. He is one of the greatest and most universally known figures in all French literature--poet, dramatist, historian, philosopher, and writer of masterpieces of fiction such as Candide, as well as his widely read Philosophic Dictionary. Throughout his life he never ceased from conducting his energetic attack against all manifestations of tyranny.--From publisher description
Print Book, English, 1963 [i.e. 1968]
Viking Press, New York, 1963 [i.e. 1968]