The Marquis de Sade, vilified by respectable society from his own time through ours, apotheosized by Apollinaire as "the freest spirit tht has yet existed, " wrote "The 120 Days of Sodom" while imprisoned in the Bastille. An exhaustive catalogue of sexual aberrations and the first systematic exploration -- a hundred years before Krafft-Ebing and Freud -- of the psychopathology of sex, it is considered Sade's crowning achievement and the cornerstone of his thought. Lost after the storming of the Bastille in 1789, it was later retrieved but remained unpublished until 1935.

Austryn Wainhouse
Wainhouse is the founder of The Marlboro Press, and has translated the works of the Marquis de Sade and Simone de Beauvoir, among others.

Pierre Klossowski
Klossowski, brother of the painter Balthus, is widely recognized as a central figure in the contemporary French avant-garde.

Simone de Beauvoir
de Beauvoir is best known for her existentialist and feminist writing.