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Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
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Les Miserables

A Novel

A Novel

Introduction by Peter Washington

A Novel

By Victor Hugo

By Victor Hugo

By Victor Hugo

By Victor Hugo

By Victor Hugo
Introduction by Peter Washington
Translated by Charles E. Wilbour

By Victor Hugo
Introduction by Peter Washington
Translated by Charles E. Wilbour

By Victor Hugo
Translated by Charles E. Wilbour

By Victor Hugo
Translated by Charles E. Wilbour

Best Seller

Part of Everyman's Library Classics Series

Paperback $18.00

Sep 29, 1996 | ISBN 9780449911679

Mass Market Paperback $9.99

Dec 12, 1982 | ISBN 9780449300022

Hardcover $45.00

Mar 31, 1998 | ISBN 9780375403170

Ebook $6.99

Oct 31, 2000 | ISBN 9780679641551

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    Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
    Hardcover $45.00
    Mar 31, 1998 | ISBN 9780375403170

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    • $18.00

      Sep 29, 1996 | ISBN 9780449911679

      Buy from Other Retailers:

    • $9.99

      Dec 12, 1982 | ISBN 9780449300022

      Buy from Other Retailers:

    • $45.00

      Mar 31, 1998 | ISBN 9780375403170

      Buy from Other Retailers:

    • Oct 31, 2000 | ISBN 9780679641551

      Buy from Other Retailers:

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    About Les Miserables

    Few novels ever swept across the world with such overpowering impact as Les Misérables. Within 24 hours, the first Paris edition was sold out. In other great cities of the world it was devoured with equal relish.

    Sensational, dramatic, packed with rich excitement and filled with the sweep and violence of human passions, Les Misérables is not only superb adventure but a powerful social document. The story of how the convict Jean-Valjean struggled to escape his past and reaffirm his humanity, in a world brutalized by poverty and ignorance, became the gospel of the poor and the oppressed.

    About Les Miserables

    Few novels ever swept across the world with such overpowering impact as Les Misérables. Within 24 hours, the first Paris edition was sold out. In other great cities of the world it was devoured with equal relish.

    Sensational, dramatic, packed with rich excitement and filled with the sweep and violence of human passions, Les Misérables is not only superb adventure but a powerful social document. The story of how the convict Jean-Valjean struggled to escape his past and reaffirm his humanity, in a world brutalized by poverty and ignorance, became the gospel of the poor and the oppressed.

    About Les Miserables

    It has been said that Victor Hugo has a street named after him in virtually every town in France. A major reason for the singular celebrity of this most popular and versatile of the great French writers is Les Misérables (1862). In this story of the trials of the peasant Jean Valjean—a man unjustly imprisoned, baffled by destiny, and hounded by his nemesis, the magnificently realized, ambiguously malevolent police detective Javert—Hugo achieves the sort of rare imaginative resonance that allows a work of art to transcend its genre.

    Les Misérables     is at once a tense thriller that contains one of the most compelling chase scenes in all literature, an epic portrayal of the nineteenth-century French citizenry, and a vital drama—highly particularized and poetic in its rendition but universal in its implications—of the redemption of one human being.

    About Les Miserables

    Les Miserables is the great epic masterpiece of the mid-nineteenth century. Begun in 1845, the year Louis Philippe conferred a peerage and a lifetime seat in the Senate upon Victor Hugo, it was completed when the author was living in exile in the Channel Islands. Les Miserables is a product as well as a document of the political, social, and religious upheaval that followed the Napoleonic Wars and Europe’s great democratic revolutions. The story is centered on Jean Valjean, a peasant who enters the novel a hardened criminal after nineteen years spent in prison for stealing a loaf of bread for the starving children of his sister. The path of Valjean’s last twenty-five years, leading from the French provinces to the battlefield of Waterloo and the ramparts of Paris during the Uprising of 1832, introduces us to secret societies of revolutionaries and the vast world of the French lower classes. Jean Valjean’s flight from the police agent Javert–the prototype of over a hundred years of fictional detectives–culminates in one of the most famous scenes in all literature, the chase through the sewers of Paris. Les Miserables sold out its large first printing in twenty-four hours and has remained enormously popular. This edition is the classic English translation of Hugo’s friend Charles Wilbour, which appeared the same year the novel was published in France.

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    About Victor Hugo

    Victor Hugo (1802–1885), novelist, poet, playwright, and French national icon, is best known for two of today’s most popular world classics: Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, as well as other works, including The Toilers of the Sea and The Man Who Laughs. Hugo was… More about Victor Hugo

    About Victor Hugo

    Victor Hugo (1802–1885), novelist, poet, playwright, and French national icon, is best known for two of today’s most popular world classics: Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, as well as other works, including The Toilers of the Sea and The Man Who Laughs. Hugo was… More about Victor Hugo

    About Victor Hugo

    Victor Hugo (1802–1885), novelist, poet, playwright, and French national icon, is best known for two of today’s most popular world classics: Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, as well as other works, including The Toilers of the Sea and The Man Who Laughs. Hugo was… More about Victor Hugo

    About Victor Hugo

    Victor Hugo (1802–1885), novelist, poet, playwright, and French national icon, is best known for two of today’s most popular world classics: Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, as well as other works, including The Toilers of the Sea and The Man Who Laughs. Hugo was… More about Victor Hugo

    Product Details

    Category: Military Fiction | Historical Fiction

    Paperback | $18.00
    Published by Ballantine Books
    Sep 29, 1996 | 336 Pages | 5-1/2 x 8-1/4 | ISBN 9780449911679

    Category: Military Fiction | Historical Fiction

    Mass Market Paperback | $9.99
    Published by Fawcett
    Dec 12, 1982 | 416 Pages | 4-3/16 x 6-7/8 | ISBN 9780449300022

    Category: Classic Fiction | Military Fiction | Historical Fiction

    Hardcover | $45.00
    Published by Everyman’s Library
    Mar 31, 1998 | 1480 Pages | 5 x 8 | ISBN 9780375403170

    Category: Classic Fiction | Military Fiction | Historical Fiction

    Ebook | $6.99
    Published by Modern Library
    Oct 31, 2000 | 1280 Pages | ISBN 9780679641551

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    Praise

    “Hugo’s genius was for the creation of simple and recognizable myth. The huge success of Les Misérables as a didactic work on behalf of the poor and oppressed is due to his poetic and myth-enlarged view of human nature.” —V. S. Pritchett

     

    “It was Tolstoy who vindicated [Hugo’s] early ambition by judging Les Misérables one of the world’s great novels, if not the greatest… [His] ability to present the extremes of experience ‘as they are’ is, in the end, Hugo’s great gift.” —From the Introduction by Peter Washington

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