Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, & Other Writings

The biography, the philosophy, and some of the most influential works of the infamous French writer who shocked the world with his erotic novel, Justine.
No other writer has so scandalized proper society as the Marquis de Sade, but despite the deliberate destruction of over three-quarters of his work, Sade remains a major figure in the history of ideas. His influence on some of the greatest minds of the last century-from Baudelaire and Swinburne to Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky and Kafka-is indisputable. This volume contains Philosophy in the Bedroom, a major novel that presents the clearest summation of his political philosophy; Eugénie de Franval, a novella widely considered to be a masterpiece of eighteenth-century French literature; and the only authentic and complete American edition of his most famous work, Justine.
This literary portrait of Sade is completed by one of his earliest philosophical efforts, Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man, a selection of his letters, a fifty-page chronology of his life, two important essays on Sade, and a bibliography of his work.
"[Sade] remains a great, horrifying, but also vastly illuminating figure." - Newsweek
" Justineis the most abominable book ever engendered by the most depraved imagination." -Napoleon Bonaparte
"Shines a perverse and revealing spotlight on the entire era of the French Revolution... An important and elucidating book." -Robert Lowry, Chicago Sun-Times

The Marquis de Sade was born in Paris, France in 1740. He fought in the French Army during the Seven Years War before he was tried and sentenced to death in 1772 for a series of sexual crimes. He escaped to Italy, but upon his return to France in 1777, he was recaptured and thrown into the prison at Vincennes. De Sade spent six years at Vincennes before being transferred to the Bastille, then to Charenton, a lunatic asylum, in 1789. He was released from the asylum a year later but was arrested again in 1801. He was moved from prison to prison before returning to Charenton in 1803, where he later died in 1814. A French novelist and playwright, de Sade is largely known for his pathological sexual views and ethical nihilism. His works include Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, Juliette, and Aline and Valcourt, Or The Philosophic Novel.