Francis Steegmuller was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1906, and educated in the public schools of Greenwich and at Columbia University. He was the author of many works about French culture and its great literary figures; translator of Gustave Flaubert’s letters and of the Modern Library edition of Madame Bovary. He was the recipient of many literary honors, including the National Book Award for his biography of Jean Cocteau, and he was a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.

Steegmuller divided his life between New York City and Europe. In 1963, he married the novelist Shirley Hazzard. He died in Naples in 1994.

Victor Brombert is the Henry Putnam University Professor of Romance and Comparative Literature Emeritus at Princeton, and has served as chairman of its Council of Humanities. A former president of the Modern Language Association and member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the author of a dozen books of literary criticism, in addition to his wartime memoirs Trains of Thought. He has published extensively on Flaubert, both in this country and in France.