172 pp. Translated from the French by James Spence Harry, from Firmin Didot's edition of the Viscount's works, with an introduction by Edward J. Harding. A novella by the French writer who had an immense influence on the Romantic movement in France. This edition includes illustrations by numerous artists, engraved by Gustave Dore, one of the pre-eminent engravers of the 19th century, who is known for his editions of Dante's Inferno, Milton's Paradise Lost, etc. "Chateaubriand was the giant of French literature in the early nineteenth century. Drawing on eighteenth-century English romanticists, on explorers in America, and on Goethe's Werther, he had a profound effect on French writers from Victor Hugo and Lamartine to George Sand and Flaubert. A quixotic and paradoxical personality, he combined impressive careers as a brilliant prose-poet, a spiritual guide, a high-ranking diplomat, and an enterprising lover. Atala is the passionate and tragic love story of a young Indian couple wandering in the wilderness, enthralled by the beauties of nature, drawn to a revivified Christianity by its esthetic charm and consoling beneficence, and finally succumbing to the cruelty of fate."
