Although Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau is best known for his Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the Inequality of Human Races, 1853-1855; first half translated as The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of the Races, 1856), he was a prolific writer of novels, novellas, and verse and an indefatigable correspondent. His enormous body of fictional work and letters (many of which are still unpublished and whose importance can be gauged by such addressees as Alexis de Tocqueville, Prosper Mérimée, Alexander von Humboldt, Albert Sorel, George Sand, Cornélie Renan, and Cosima Wagner) places his historical, critical, and ethnographic writings in a different light. One critic suggested that if Gobineau had continued to devote himself to literary criticism, typified by the essays on contemporary writers that he composed during the 1840s, he would have been one of the most distinguished French literary...