Franpois-RenU de Chateaubriand (1768-1848), a writer, historian, and diplomat, is considered one of France's first Romantic authors.Alex Andriesse is a writer and translator. He lives in Dublin, Ireland, and western Massachusetts.Anka Muhlstein was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1996 for her biography of Astolphe de Custine, and has twice received the History Prize of the French Academy.
To read Chateaubriand is to witness the subjective and yet comprehensive unfolding of a society's change: of customs, prospects, ethics, conventions. He stands (as in the famous portrait by Girodet) on the farther shore. --Alberto Manguel <p/> The Memoirs from Beyond the Grave [...] encapsulate and bring to perfect mastery all the linguistic registers that their author had by turns attempted: epic, tragic, elegiac, lyric, oratorical, narrative, descriptive - like an evening rainbow over a Venetian lagoon. -Marc Fumaroli <p/> Chateaubriand's Memoirs, with all their myth makingmythmaking, posing, and dark glamour, are his Arc de Triomphe, and may yet prove more lasting than their equivalent in stone. --Adam Kirsch <p/> A Romantic classic. --BBC News, Paris <p/> Chateaubriand's... Memoires d'outre-tombe, his Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, is at once sublime literature, brilliant history seen by a fiercely intelligent eye-witness, and a self-portrait of a remarkable and complex man. Chateaubriand is one of that worldly, intellectually -restless literary set, including Goethe and Byron, who may be said to have founded and developed the wider European Romantic movement, granting it social relevance and gaining it an extensive European and North American audience. --A. S. Kline