Considered by some to be one of the most impressive French writers of the twentieth century, Montherlant made his reputation with a series of outrageously antifeminist novels in the 1930s. Then, at the height of his powers, he wrote several plays which are considered to be among the finest in the French language. Finally, toward the end of his life, he returned to the novel. Throughout his career he had been a prolific and influential essayist. His collected writings fill several substantial volumes of some fifteen hundred pages each. And yet his work remains in large measure outside the mainstream of contemporary French literature. Lucille Becker, one of his most perceptive English-language critics, makes clear why in her Henry de Montherlant (1970): "His glorification of the exceptional exploits and moral superiority of the hero is aristocratic, in a day when literature of that class has died out. While the...