Robert Alter is Professor in the Graduate School and Emeritus Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Nabokov and the Real World, Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible, and Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem, among other books. Award-winning translator of the complete Hebrew Bible, Alter has received the National Jewish Book Award for Lifetime Achievement, the PEN Center Literary Award for Translation, and the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for lifetime contribution to American letters.

This excellent short biography…brings out both the charms and the complexities of Stendhal. The tone of the book is discreetly admiring, but ironic enough when need be to remind one of the saving and consummate irony of its subject.

• * Preface * Roman Prelude Part One: the Young Man from the Provinces * Grenoble (Aetat. 1-16) * Paris (Aetat. 16-17) * Italy (Aetat. 17-18) * Return To Paris (Aetat. 19-22) Part Two: The Initiate * Marseilles (Aetat. 22-23) * Prussia and Paris (Aetat. 23-28) * Milan (Aetat. 28-29) * Moscow to Milan (Aetat. 29-31) Part Three: The Free Lance * Milan (Aetat. 31-38) * Paris (Aetat. 38-44) * The End of the Paris Years (Aetat. 44-47) Part Four: The Consul * Civiatavecchia (Aetat. 48-53) * Paris (Aetat. 53-55) * Civiatavecchia and Paris (Aetat. 56-59) * Index * Illustrations