The Marquis De Sade

The Marquis de Sade spent 32 years in prisons and asylums, writing works of such extreme sexual violence that his name gave English the word "sadism." His novels — 120 Days of Sodom, Justine, Juliette — pushed transgression past any limit earlier literature had approached.

Was Sade a serious thinker exposing the violence inside power, or a disturbed man producing repulsive fantasies? It remains one of literary criticism's most contested questions. Simone de Beauvoir and Michel Foucault read him as a serious philosopher. Others find him simply unreadable.