author
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
1804–1869
A sharp-eyed critic who helped shape modern literary biography, he became one of 19th-century France's most influential voices on books and writers. His essays and studies are still remembered for linking a writer's life to their work in vivid, readable ways.
5 Audiobooks
Literary and Philosophical Essays: French, German and Italian
by Michel de Montaigne, Immanuel Kant, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Giuseppe Mazzini, Ernest Renan, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Friedrich Schiller
Portraits littéraires, Tome I
by Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
Portraits littéraires, Tome II
by Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
Monsieur de Talleyrand
by Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
Portraits littéraires, Tome III
by Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
About the author
Born in Boulogne-sur-Mer on December 23, 1804, and later based in Paris, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve trained in medicine before turning to journalism, poetry, fiction, and criticism. He became widely known through literary essays and newspaper criticism, building a reputation for close, character-based reading of authors and their works.
He moved in the major literary circles of his time and wrote across several forms, but his lasting importance comes from criticism. Works such as Portraits littéraires and the multi-volume Port-Royal helped establish his method: understanding books through the temperament, background, and lived experience of the people who wrote them.
Sainte-Beuve died in Paris on October 13, 1869. Even readers who disagree with his judgments often see him as a central figure in the history of literary criticism, because he made the study of writers' lives an essential part of how literature could be read and discussed.