Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil)

by Pericles Lewis In August of 1857, the French lawyer who had prosecuted Gustave Flaubert, Ernest Pinard, had greater success in prosecuting Charles Baudelaire for The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du Mal) (1857). The court banned six of Baudelaire’s erotic poems, two of them on lesbian themes and the other four heterosexual but mildly… Continue Reading Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil)

Joseph Conrad

Biography by Anthony Domestico Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), a Polish expatriate born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, worked as a sailor on French and British ships before becoming a naturalized British subject in 1886. He developed an elaborate, beautiful English prose style and probed many of the deep questions of modern fiction in his short stories and novels.  His work was… Continue Reading Joseph Conrad