La Batarde

A poignant, blazingly frank account of the first forty years of the life of France's greatest "unknown" woman writer. Praised by Camus, Sartre, Cocteau, Genet, and Simone de Beauvoir, Violette Leduc was relatively ignored by the French public until the appearance of La Batarde. Her book, an immediate and continuing bestseller, was the subject of a long and laudatory report in The New Yorker's "Paris Letter," and had been described by a special correspondent of The New York Times as "the book that has scorched France."