Gilles Deleuze, one of the most influential and prolific French philosophers of the postwar period, was born in Paris, and lived there, with a few exceptions, for the rest of his life. The son of a conservative, middle-class engineer, a veteran of World War I, Deleuze received his early elementary education in the French public school system. When the Germans invaded France, Deleuze's family was on vacation in Normandy, and he spent a year being schooled there. Deleuze traced his own initiation into literature and philosophy to his encounter with a teacher at Deauville named Pierre Halwachs (son of the sociologist Maurice Halwachs), who introduced him to writers such as André Gide and Charles Baudelaire. Early on, he later recalled, philosophical concepts struck him with the same force as literary characters, having their own autonomy and style, and he soon began to read philosophical...