Neil Schaeffer presents here a wholly original, compellingly human portrait of the "divine Marquis," the enigmatic legend whose name is synonymous with brutal perversion and cruelty. Against a magnificently embroidered backdrop of eighteenth-century France, he shows us Sade's incredible life of sexual appetite, adherence to Enlightenment principles, imprisonment, scandal, and above all inexhaustible imagination. Based on a decade of research and utilizing work never before published in English, The Marquis de Sade is a definitive work that confronts nearly two hundred years of myth to reveal a Promethean figure of astonishing complexity.

Neil Schaeffer is Professor of English Literature at Brooklyn College.