A fast-paced narrative about the world-famous libertine Giacomo Casanova, from celebrated biographer Leo Damrosch**“A nuanced, deftly contextualized biography of an adventurer, an opportunist, and a man of voracious appetites . . . another top-notch work from Damrosch.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)“An eye-opening and well-informed study of an ‘extraordinary character’ in all his darkness and brilliance.”—Publishers Weekly**The l...

The story of the group of extraordinary eighteenth-century writers, artists, and thinkers who gathered weekly at a London tavernNamed one of the 10 Best Books of 2019 by the New York Times Book Review • A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2019 • A Kirkus Best Book of 2019“Damrosch brings the Club’s redoubtable personalities—the brilliant minds, the jousting wits, the tender camaraderie—to vivid life.”

Alexis de Tocqueville is more quoted than read; commentators across the political spectrum invoke him as an oracle who defined America and its democracy for all times. But in fact his masterpiece, Democracy in America, was the product of a young man's open-minded experience of America at a time of rapid change. In Tocqueville's Discovery of America, the prizewinning biographer Leo Damrosch retraces Tocqueville's nine-month journey through the young nation in 1831–1832, il...

William Blake, overlooked in his time, remains an enigmatic figure to contemporary readers despite his near canonical status. Out of a wounding sense of alienation and dividedness he created a profoundly original symbolic language, in which words and images unite in a unique interpretation of self and society. He was a counterculture prophet whose art still challenges us to think afresh about almost every aspect of experience—social, political, philosophical, religious, erotic, and aesthet...

From a critically acclaimed biographer, an engrossing narrative of Robert Louis Stevenson’s life, a story as romantic and adventurous as his fiction“This magnificent biography of Robert Louis Stevenson reveals much about a writer that we think we knew. . . . Dazzling.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) is famed for Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and M...

Translated by Peter ConstantineEdited and with a new introduction by Leo Damrosch'Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains' is the dramatic opening line of The Social Contract, published in 1762. Quoted by politicians and philosophers alike, the power of this sentence continues to resonate. It laid the groundwork for both the American and French Revolutions, and is considered a foundational text in the development of the modern principles of...

Newly translated by Peter ConstantineEdited and with an Introduction by Leo DamroschThe Essential Writings of Rousseau collects the best and most indispensable work of one of the world’s most influential writers. A towering figure of Enlightenment thought, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was also one of that movement’s most passionate and persuasive critics. His extraordinarily original observations on politics, education, and human nature we...

Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was the greatest English poet of his age, whose acerbic insights into human nature have entered the language, and whose verse still astonishes with its energy and inventiveness centuries after his death. This new selection of Pope's work follows the path of his poetic genius over his lifetime. It contains early poems including the masterly mock-epic 'The Rape of the Lock', which satirizes a notorious society scandal through glorious heroic couplets, the brilliant...