by Victor Hugo

Introduction and Afterword by Shoshana Milgram Knapp

"The Man Who Laughs is Victor Hugo's best novel. (Curiously enough it was the one least understood by his contemporaries.) It is not a work of historical fiction, as its background of eighteenth-century England suggests, but a symbolic fantasy—an abstraction enacted on a profound metaphysical level. It is a work in which Hugo's imagination, freed of lesser concerns, creates a universe built in his own image and likeness. It is a dramatization of his view of man's existence presented in the form and the violent action of a suspense story."

—Ayn Rand

(Hardcover; 575 pages)