Author: Samuel Putman
Publisher: Viking P21
Year: 1960 Print: 6 Cover Price: $1.45
Condition: Very Good. Light wear and tanning
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 623
120119019E

Francois Rabelais is now universally acknowledged to be one of the world's great writers, the peer of Aristophanes, Cervantes, and the Shakespeare who gave us Falstaff. He is also the creator of a literature embodying the breath and spirit of the Renaissance era, with its boundless thirst for new, wider horizons, for human freedom and the good life for all. He was the first great and truly popular writer of modern times. It is only today, in this age of Freud, Joyce, and Proust, the subconscious and the dream, that we are beginning to appreciate his proper worth as writer and artist, and as a man of the modern world. The four books of Gargantua and Pantagruel are included in this volume; the only omissions are some of the archaic, obscure, and least "Rabelaisian" portions. In effect, the whole great work is here, with most of the text intact and with continuity supplied for the omitted passages. Samuel Putnam's translation is smooth and lively and his introduction provides a wealth of material about Rabelais and his times.