November 9, 1999

Biographer and novelist Francine du Plessix Gray, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Distinguished Visiting Scholar, lectured in Sanders Auditorium on “What Shall We Do with the Marquis de Sade?” In her biography of de Sade, At Home With the Marquis de Sade: A Life (1998), Gray advanced, through a close study of the man and the two women who were closest to him—his wife and mother—a thesis that de Sade’s “crude insistence on expressing humankind’s most bestial urges, on speaking out what most of us barely dare to admit–on mirroring the primal impulse we’ve all had, at some point, to claw at the taboos of our own caged lives—…makes him an occasionally fascinating and very modern writer.”