Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature

"Splendid…[Darnton gives] us vivid, hard-won detail, illuminating narrative, and subtle, original insight." —Timothy Garton Ash, New York Review of Books

With his uncanny ability to spark life in the past, Robert Darnton re-creates three historical worlds in which censorship shaped literary expression in distinctive ways.

In eighteenth-century France, censors, authors, and booksellers collaborated in making literature by navigating the intricate culture of royal privilege. Even as the king's ...