Born in Avignon, France, on Christmas Day, René Girard's (b. 1923) work has been a blend of history, literature, and philosophy with implications for science, technology, and ethics that have only begun to be appreciated. He graduated from the Ecole des Chartes in Paris in 1947 (as a specialist in medieval studies) with a thesis on private life in his hometown of Avignon in the second half of the fifteenth century. A year's trip abroad turned into a Ph.D. in history from Indiana University, after which Girard remained in the United States, where he retired as a professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization from Stanford University in 1995.

Girard's early historiographic publications soon shifted to an avalanche of literary criticism. His first book, Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1966), contrasted the romantic lie of individualism with the novelistic truth of what he called imitative...