The Portable Voltaire -- Voltaire

Includes Part One of <i>Candide</i>; three stories; selections from <i>The Philosophical Dictionary, The Lisbon Earthquake</i>, and other works; and thirty-five letters.<br><br><b>Author:</b> Voltaire<br><b>Publisher:</b> Penguin Publishing Group<br><b>Published:</b> 07/28/1977<br><b>Pages:</b> 576<br><b>Binding Type:</b> Paperback<br><b>Weight:</b> 0.88lbs<br><b>Size:</b> 7.79h x 5.05w x 1.14d<br><b>ISBN:</b> 9780140150414<br><b>Age Range:</b> 18-UP<br><p><b>About the Author</b><br><b>François-Marie Arouet</b>, writing under the pseudonym <b>Voltaire</b>, was born in 1694 into a Parisian bourgeois family. Educated by Jesuits, he was an excellent pupil but one quickly enraged by dogma. An early rift with his father--who wished him to study law--led to his choice of letters as a career. Insinuating himself into court circles, he became notorious for lampoons on leading notables and was twice imprisoned in the Bastille.<p>By his mid-thirties his literary activities precipitated a four-year exile in England where he won the praise of Swift and Pope for his political tracts. His publication, three years later in France, of <b>Lettres philosophiques sur les Anglais</b> (1733)--an attack on French Church and State--forced him to flee again. For twenty years Voltaire lived chiefly away from Paris. In this, his most prolific period, he wrote such satirical tales as "<b>Zadig</b>" (1747) and "<b>Candide</b>" (1759). His old age at Ferney, outside Geneva, was made bright by his adopte