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Denis Diderot is often associated with the decades-long battle to bring the world's first comprehensive Encyclop�die into existence. But his most daring writing took place in the shadows. Thrown into prison for his atheism in 1749, Diderot decided to reserve his best books for posterity--for us, in fact. In the astonishing cache of unpublished writings left behind after his death, Diderot challenged virtually all of his century's accepted truths, from the sanctity of monarchy, to the racial justification of the slave trade, to the norms of human sexuality. One of Diderot's most attentive readers during his lifetime was Catherine the Great, who not only supported him financially, but invited him to St. Petersburg to talk about the possibility of democratizing the Russian empire. In this thematically organized biography, Andrew S. Curran vividly describes Diderot's tormented relationship with Rousseau, his curious correspondence with Voltaire, his passionate affairs, and his often iconoclastic stands on art, theater, morality, politics, and religion. But what this book brings out most brilliantly is how the writer's personal turmoil was an essential part of his genius and his ability to flout taboos, dogma, and convention.

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Read by Paul Boehmer, Gabrielle de Cuir, Carrington MacDuffie, Stefan Rudnicki, Emily Janice Card, Ellen Datlow, Bob Duncan, Dan Jenkins, Richard Lim, Margie Moore, Scott Peterson, Tom Schiff, Mirron Willis, Judy Young, David Birney, Rosalyn Landor, and Arte Johnson Andrew S. Curran is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities and Professor of French at Wesleyan University. He was also Dean of Arts and Humanities at the university from 2009 to 2013. He is the author of several books, including Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment, and Sublime Disorder, Physical Monstrosity in Diderot's Universe. Curran lives in Connecticut with his wife, Jen. They have two children.

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