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Candide or Optimism (Penguin Classics)

Candide or Optimism (Penguin Classics)

by Francois Voltaire (Author), Francois Voltaire (Author), John Butt (Translator)

  • Used

    Paperback 2000

    $3.77

  • Used

    Paperback 1968

    $3.25
Synopsis

"Candide" is the story of a gentle man who, though pummeled and slapped in every direction by fate, clings desperately to the belief that he lives in "the best of all possible worlds." On the surface a witty, bantering tale, this eighteenth-century classic is actually a savage, satiric thrust at the philosophical optimism that proclaims that all disaster and human suffering is part of a benevolent cosmic plan. Fast, funny, often outrageous, the French philosopher's immortal narrative takes Candide around the world to discover that -- contrary to the teachings of his distringuished tutor Dr. Pangloss -- all is not always for the best. Alive with wit, brilliance, and graceful storytelling, "Candide" has become Voltaire's most celebrated work.

$3.77

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More Information

Format: Paperback
 Pages: 144
 Edition: Reissue
 Publisher: Penguin Classics
Published: 11 May 2000
ISBN 10: 0140440046
ISBN 13: 9780140440041

Media Reviews
Winner of the 2012 Fifty Books/Fifty Covers show, organized by Design Observer in association with AIGA and Designers & Books

Winner of the 2014 Type Directors Club Communication Design Award

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Author Bio
Fran´┐¢ois-Marie Arouet, writing under the pseudonym Voltaire, 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.

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 Lettres philosophiques sur les Anglais (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 Zadig (1747) and Candide (1759). His old age at Ferney, outside Geneva, was made bright by his adopted daughter, Belle et Bonne, and marked by his intercessions in behalf of victims of political injustice. Sharp-witted and lean in his white wig, impatient with all appropriate rituals, he died in Paris in 1778--the foremost French author of his day.