A Scholar's Life

What is a lettered person? How does such a person eat, sleep, work, love, live, and die? From Socrates, Confucius, and Cicero to Petrarch, Émilie du Châtelet, Nietzsche and hundreds more, a scholar's life is told as never before in this remarkable literary history.

William Marx holds the Chair of Comparative Literature at the College de France.

This book is translated from Vie du lettre (Minuit, 2009), recipient of the Montyon Prize of the Academie francaise in 2010.