François Rabelais

Born in France sometime between about 1483 and 1494, François Rabelais lived during the Renaissance and moved through several worlds at once: religion, medicine, scholarship, and literature. Sources describe him as a humanist and a gifted student of classical languages, especially Greek, and he also practiced as a physician.

Rabelais is remembered above all for Gargantua and Pantagruel, the series of comic novels that made him one of the great voices of French prose. The books are full of giants, jokes, arguments, lists, inventions, and sharp satire, using laughter to poke at education, politics, religion, and the habits of his age.

Although many details of his early life remain uncertain, his reputation has only grown. What made his writing last is the sheer energy of it: learned but playful, rude at times, and deeply curious about how people think, speak, and live.