Diderot

by Philip Nicholas Furbank

Denis Diderot (1713-84) was one of the most dazzling and attractive figures of the French Enlightenment. Known principally as the chief editor of the Encyclopedie, the great "bible" of the age, he was an incomparable polymath - a dramatist, novelist, speculative philosopher, the founder of modern art criticism, and tireless correspondent. And his works, all of them informed by an uncannily modern sensibility, have influenced a staggering range of writers - from Goethe. and Schiller to Balzac, Stendhal, Heine, Marx, Freud, and Kafka. In this masterful biography, P. N. Furbank provides a probing yet sympathetic account of Diderot's life and a brilliant analysis of his work, drawing intriguing connections between many previously disjointed notions about the man and his achievement. The son of a cutler (though a hopeless craftsman himself), Denis Diderot rose, after an interestingly complicated youth, to become an intimate of all the. eminent intellectuals of the Enlightenment. A close fri