France s great Catholic author and Nobel Prize winner unfolds his thoughts on a variety of topics in a series of letters written to such men as Albert Camus, Jean Cocteau, Pierre Schaeffer and Jacques Riviere. Readers of Proust s Way, Men I Hold Great and The Stumbling Block will find intense interest in Mauriac s reflections on the death of Georges Bernanos, the Claudel-Gide correspondence and the Routier youth movement."

The thinking and suffering of the author ofRemembrance of Things Pastare intimately exposed in these letters to Mauriac. Mauriac, Francois 1885 1970, French writer. Mauriac achieved success in 1922 and 1923 with Le Baiser au lepreux and Genitrix (tr. of both in The Family, 1930). Generally set in or near his native Bordeaux, his novels are imbued with his profound, though nonconformist, Roman Catholicism. His characters exist in a tortured universe; nature is evil and man eternally prone to sin. His major novels are The Desert of Love (1925, tr. 1929), Therese (1927, tr. 1928), and Vipers'...

From the moment she walks from court having been charged with attempting to poison her husband, to her banishment, escape to Paris, and final years of solitude and waiting, the life of Therese Desqueyroux is passionate and tortured. The victim of a hostile fate, Therese, as Mauriac said of her belongs to that class of human beings for whom night can end only when life itself ends. All that is asked of them is that they should not resign themselves to night s darkness. Therese s moving and powerful story affirms the vitality of the human spirit, making her an unforgettable heroine."