The Pleasures of Reading

Henri Beyle, a French writer who took many pen names, made one pseudonym famous: Stendhal. Though he was jeered at in his own times, he is famous now for his brilliant character analyses, and is regarded as a pivotal figure in the world's literature. A passionate, witty, and adventurous Frenchman, he crowned his madcap career with two immortal novels, The Red & the Black (1830), and The Charterhouse of Parma (1839). It was not until long after his death, as he himself had predicted, that the literary world awakened to his true significance. It almost seems as if his writings were directed to the troubled times of our own century, yet he was born at Grenoble, in southeastern France, on January 23, 1783, during the later years of Louis XVI's reign. If any single adjective could describe his brilliant writing, it would be modern.