In this prize-winning memoir, Jean-Jacques Pauvert recounts in vivid detail his meteoric rise to the top of the French book world. By the tender age of twenty, Pauvert successfully published the complete works of the Marquis de Sade, which led to a protracted legal struggle with the French authorities. A similar firestorm erupted three years later in 1954, after he published Histoire d'O, a daring work by a then anonymous author that again drew the ire of censorship advocates. He begins his career in 1942, working in the mailroom of the venerable publishing house run by Gaston Gallimard,...