In the spring of 1956 Roger Vailland returned to France from Moscow, where he had heard Nikita Khrushchev denounce the corruption of Stalin's regime. At once he replaced the portrait of the former Soviet leader which hung above his desk with a photograph of a flute player on the statue of Venus's throne in Rome's Thermal Museum. Such an action, trivial in itself, may nonetheless be seen as symbolic of a man whose interests were considered by many to oscillate irregularly between politics and the erotic. The fact that Vailland is difficult to define has contributed to his not being accorded a major role in the developments of French literature in the twentieth century. Yet as novelist, essayist, and, to a lesser extent, playwright and journalist, his stature is by no means negligible. His discussions and portraits of the libertine figure, his involvement with the Resistance and with the...