The Double Life of Paul De Man

A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year (Nonfiction)

A landmark biography that reveals the secret past of one of the most influential academics of the twentieth century.

Over thirty years after his death in 1983, Paul de Man, a hugely charismatic intellectual who created with deconstruction an ideology so pervasive that it threatened to topple the very foundations of literature, remains a haunting and still largely unexamined figure. Deeply influential, de Man and his theory-driven philosophy...