Victor Hugo was the most important writer of the nineteenth century in France: leader of the Romantic movement, Revolutionary playwright, poet, epic novelist, author of the last universally accessible masterpieces in the European tradition, among them Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He was also a radical political thinker and eventual exile from France, a gifted painter and architect, and a visionary who conversed with Virgil, Shakespeare, and Jesus Christ - in short, a tantalizing personality who dominated and maddened his contemporaries.

Graham Robb has written an extraordinary biography that does full justice to the drama of his subject's life - a life that Robb calls 'the most lucid case of madness in literature'. By grasping the giant in his entirety and in his many disguises, Robb, bestselling author of The Discovery of France, rewards us with a panorama of French and European society from the Revolution to the dawn of the twentieth century.

Victor Hugo won the Whitbread Award for Biography and the Royal Society of Literature award.

Whitbread Biography of the Year.

About the Author
Graham Robb was born in Manchester in 1958 and is a former Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. He has published widely on French literature and history. His 2007 book The Discovery of France won both the Duff Cooper and Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prizes. For Parisians the City of Paris awarded him the Grande Medaille de la Ville de Paris. He lives on the English-Scottish border.

Reviews
Mr Robb has written an enthralling book - one of the great biographies of our time. He contrives not to be dwarfed by his subject, which is some contrivance. He makes of Hugo's life a story as exciting to read as it was extraordinary to have lived. He has a matchless gift for narrative. His style is epigrammatic and compelling. His judgements seem fair - not something Hugo was used to in life. Every Place Victor Hugo should now have a Cafe-Bar Graham Robb. He deserves, and will probably get, the Legion d'honneur. -- Allan Massie * Daily Telegraph *
One of the best biographies I have read, ever. -- Selina Hastings
Robb achieves the goal of all good literary biographies by making us long to regain, or savour for the first time, Hugo's company as a writer. Surely no chronicler of his life or analyst of his work has ever looked this prodigy of nature so unflinchingly in the eye. -- Jonathan Keates * Literary Review *
Graham Robb's exuberant biography of the French writer blows the cobwebs away from a neglected hero and sets him before us in lurid and quite unforgettable shape. Robb's jaunty, self-confident style is gloriously appropriate to his subject . . . Robb's enthusiasm is hugely exhilarating and his biography is a fascinating study in the making of a celebrity. -- Miranda Seymour * Sunday Times, Books of the Year *
The best life of the writer available in English (and likely to remain so for some time) . . . His fascinating, totally readable Life will introduce Hugo to many readers who know him only as a name. -- Robin Buss * Independent on Sunday *


Awards
Winner of Whitbread Biography Award 1998 (UK).



Book Information
ISBN 9780330371452
Author Graham Robb
Format Paperback
Page Count 720
Imprint Picador
Publisher Pan Macmillan
Weight(grams) 564g
Dimensions(mm) 197mm * 131mm * 44mm