The Mandarins

First published in 1954, this novel follows a circle of Left Bank writers and editors in Paris after the Liberation. Anne Dubreuilh, a psychoanalyst, her husband Robert, the novelist Henri Perron, and their friends argue over the Communist Party, the United States, and what a journal should print, while Anne's affair with the American Lewis Brogan and Henri's ties to Paula and Josette run beside the politics. The action moves between Paris, a working paper, and a stay in America. The book is a roman a clef of postwar intellectual life, not a war novel of the Occupation.

Bound in blue pictorial cloth. Purple-pink endleaves. Brown slipcase.