François Mauriac is without doubt one of the most important and prolific French authors of this century. His death on 1 September 1970 marked the close of a career unlikely to be paralleled in the literary history of France. A poet, he began his literary career with the publication in 1909 of a collection of poems, Les Mains jointes (Clasped Hands), reviewed with enthusiasm by the established writer Maurice Barrés, who predicted celebrity for the young author. To this Mauriac added in 1925 Orages (Storms), and in 1940 Le Sang d'Atys (The Blood of Atys), a long poem on which he worked intermittently for close to ten years. A literary critic, Mauriac meditated on the art of fiction in such works as Le Roman (The Novel, 1928) and Le Romancier et ses personnages (The Novelist and his Characters, 1933). A Christian moralist, author of numerous essays on Catholic thinkers and saints...