The Red and the Black

Based again on Robert M. Adams’s highly regarded translation of Stendhal’s 1831 novel of ambition, love, and betrayal, this Second Norton Critical Edition of The Red and the Black is the most comprehensive and up-to-date edition available.

Susanna Lee’s thoughtful revision of the footnotes for the Second Edition, expanding detailed references to historical figures and nineteenth-century French locales, will greatly assist students in understanding this complicated novel. She is Associate Professor of French at Georgetown University. She is the author of A World Abandoned by God: Narrative and Secularism, and has written numerous articles on nineteenth-century narrative literature, the history of ideas, and American crime fiction.

Robert M. Adams was Professor of English (Emeritus) at the University of California at Los Angeles. He was the author of many books, including Ikon: John Milton and the Modern Critics; Strains of Discord; Proteus, His Lies, His Truth: Discussion of Literary Translation; The Land and Literature of England; and Shakespeare—The Four Romances. In addition to the Norton Critical Edition of Utopia (he was translator and editor of the First and Second Editions), Professor Adams was editor of five other Norton Critical Editions, including The Prince by Machiavelli, Candide by Voltaire, and The Praise of Folly and Other Writings by Erasmus, the texts of which he also translated. He was a founding editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature.