Selected Essays

by Henry de Montherlant

From the inside flap of the dust "Selected Essays shows the author at his frankest and most disarming. He writes at first hand of sport, sex, war, and literary creation, often in terms of each other with a bullfighter's conscious provocativeness and economy of technique. He is, after all, when the adventurer, the libertine, and the patrician athlete are disposed of, essentially a moralist in the tradition of Montaigne and La Rochefoucauld. The maxims at the end of this book…are the ideal springboard for a considered leap into both the novels and the plays."-The Times (London)

304 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 1960

About the author

Henry de Montherlant (1895-1972) fut romancier, dramaturge, essayiste et poète. Il était membre de l’Académie française et peut être considéré comme un des plus grands écrivains du XXe siècle, à l’égal d’un Proust ou d’un Céline.

Reviews

[Andrew Weitzel · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I shall build, and then I shall destroy that which I have built. There we have an epigraph for this book - an epigraph for my life".

de Montherlant was an interesting guy, full of contradictions and reveling in them. This collection of essays covers a wide variety of topics, from literary criticism to impending world war, injected with de Montherlant's sometimes-ascetic sometimes-libertine morality.