Paul Claudel brought high distinction to France in his two careers as a writer and a politician. His collected works fill twenty-six volumes; his notebooks take up seven volumes; and his correspondence comprises twenty-one collections. He wrote poetry; plays; novels; essays; treatises; biographies; literary, art, and theater criticism; biblical commentary and exegesis; hagiography; and devotional works. He served in the French consular and diplomatic service in New York and Boston (1893-1895), Shanghai (1895-1905), Peking (1906-1909), Prague (1909-1911), Frankfurt and Hamburg (1912-1914), Paris and Rome (1915-1916), Rio de Janeiro (1917-1918), and Copenhagen (1919-1921). In the 1920s and 1930s he was the French ambassador to Japan (1921-1927), the United States (1927-1933), and Belgium (1933-1935). He managed to interweave both careers, writing about politics and politicizing the act of writing, without compromising his professional ambidexterity or conflicting his interests in political ideology and literary ideas. He was a loyal career diplomat...